The Blazing World (23 page)

And we fight and snarl, too.

H: Finish the poem or flush it!

B: Get your butt out there and show your own work, you coward!

But I’m in love, isn’t that mad? Now, to really end here. I am wanted, wanted. In your eyes, Bruno man, I am shining (well, at least part of the time). Sleep now, sleep, as the bard says, sleep, the balm of hurt minds.

January 18, 2000

Maisie reported today that Aven has an imaginary friend who lives in her throat. The person is known as Radish, and is causing upheaval in the household. Maisie has taken to addressing Radish, which means that Aven spends a lot of time with her mouth gaping, so her mother can confront the invisible insurrectionist directly. I am all sympathy because Bodley was with me for years, and I remember him with much love, but Maisie is worried that Radish has made her appearance (it’s female) for dark psychological reasons—the child is under stress in nursery school. They are showing her letters and numbers she wants nothing to do with. She has just been given eyeglasses, another worry (for her mother, I believe, more than for Aven). I told Maisie that these friends, wherever they may be lodged, inside or outside, are usually helpful and serve some useful purpose. My own mother was very kind about Bodley. She set a place for him at the table and talked to him politely (when he wasn’t misbehaving).

As for the plot, it seems to be working. Phineas has been offered a show of
The Suffocation Rooms
at Begley in the spring of next year. I had a hallelujah moment about my own queer sensibility, about showing my Phinny man. But then a hint of sadness, low thoughts soon after. I have begun to wonder if I could show work by Anonymous. That might be impossible. There is no orderly vision without context, it seems. Art is not allowed to arrive spontaneously unauthored. Bruno says that turning my pseudonyms into moving pieces in a philosophical game about perception is just a cover for my insecurity. I am masked twice. Phinny disagrees. He has been out and about with me, traveling incognito, so to speak. He says that he has seen it over and over again. He has seen that it matters little what I say; my intelligence is discounted. Piffle and twaddle. Were I to come out with
The Suffocation Rooms
, the powers-that-be would instantly back away.

The work would look different.

Would it look old-womanish all of a sudden?

I insist that this is a question with urgency.

I have often wondered what a Josephine Cornell would have looked like to people? Piffle and twaddle, frippery and sentiment? Soft?

Not the same, surely, as Joseph.

When it’s a gay man, it’s something else again, right?

Phinny says yes and no. He cites Ethan; it’s queered, he says, but there’s macho and fey, top and bottom, somehow important.

Is it?

I tell him I like being queered with him, paired and queered.

Eve, with her high heels and her low-cut sweaters and her corsets worn on the outside and her Rube Goldberg machines made out of old dresses, is oblivious to the onus of her sex. Well, she’s young. She knows about me and P.Q. She had to know because she lives here.

Two days ago while we were lounging about before bed, Phinny actually yelled at the big B. “Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter what she does! They see the widow or they see her money. They are blinded by what they think they see!”

Another Goldberg, the Goldberg study, 1968. Women students evaluated an identical essay more poorly when a female name was attached to it than when a male name was attached. The same results were found when they were presented with a work of visual art. Goldberg study revisited, 1983. Men and women students rated the essay with a female name attached more poorly than with a male name attached. And so it goes, but there is a twist as the research progresses in the 1990s. When expert credentials are attached to a woman’s name, the bias disappears. For artists, expertise is fame. Sex and color don’t disappear; they no longer matter.
^VII

Bruno does not want any part of bias studies or psychological research. I am not just another dame. I am his very own brilliant Harry. Give the jerks a chance. They’ll come around. Weirdly, his faith that Phinny and I are wrong makes me happy, and Phinny’s insistence that I am right makes me unhappy. I am perverse.

(Phinny is thinking of himself, too. The glare of prejudice is all too familiar.)

Sometimes I think of Anton sadly.

There is something else. I met Rune. I can’t say why, but I didn’t mention our encounter to Bruno. It was at the opening for some silly work—balloons, faces. Such a handsome man. Anointed, heralded, wearing his laurels. Vain, I think, probably very vain, but aren’t we all? And then maybe we attribute more vanity to beautiful people than to the plain, and perhaps it isn’t fair. We talked about memory. Mnemosyne is the mother of the Muses. Cicero. One thought led to the next. It was almost as if he knew me, one of those uncanny connections. And what about machine memory? This fascinates him, artificial intelligence, but, I say, they have hit many dead ends. I told him about Thomas Metzinger
.
^VIII
Looked at Rune’s work again—faces in surgery, flaps of skin. I have a catalogue. New surfaces, he was saying, surgically transformed, but also bionic technology for new limbs that respond to the nervous system, computers as extended selves-minds. All true. But what does it mean? He spoke to me about external memory—an odd idea. For him the frenzy for documentation, photos, films, the second lives on the Internet, the simulated wars and games. I pointed out that self-consciousness is not new. But the technology is, he insisted. He said, “I want my art to be these questions.” We don’t agree, but that might be the pleasure, the sharp back-and-forth, the agon with a worthy partner. I recommended papers and books to him, and he wrote them down. Read Varela and Manturana, I said.
^VIIII
He said he would. We talked about Wechsler. On him, we agreed.
O’s Journey
. When we said goodbye, his handshake was just right, neither limp nor too firm. When his e-mail arrived, I felt giddy with hope, for the end of exile in my own head, for someone who will understand me, someone who will
see
what I know and talk back to me about it. Is this so ridiculous? Isn’t it possible?

Recognition. Dr. F. Isn’t that what we talk about? My greed for recognition. One to one. Tête-à-tête. You and I. I want you to
see
me.

Bruno listens to me, but he doesn’t always know what I am talking about. Nobody seems to know what I am talking about.

A year ago, I saw part of his film diary—the man, Rune (once Rune Larsen), at daily tasks, brushing his teeth, flossing his teeth, lying on the sofa, reading, sitting in front of the computer, and then stroking a redheaded woman’s hair over and over as she lay with her head on his shoulder in a big rumpled bed. And I thought to myself, this is what we never see because we are inside, not outside, and most of us cannot recall habitual events except as a blur of routine. Is this why he wants the film? The date appears on the screen, and there is a film for each day. The film does not run all day. It is not Warhol’s sleeper or the Empire State Building, but he documents one event, often minor, every day.

Do I remember if I took my vitamin this morning or brushed my teeth? Was it this morning or yesterday morning or the day before?

The hair-stroking might remain inside Rune and the young woman as a memory, but most likely from the internal perspective of each of them, each “I”—but sometimes we remember as observers. It is a kind of false memory. I remember the afternoon I stroked your curls over and over when we were first in love. I remember lying with you in bed and feeling your fingers in my hair as you petted me for minutes on end and how lovely it felt, and I remember the daylight in the room, and I remember our love. What is the memory of love? Do we actually recall the feeling? No. We know it was there, but the manic desire isn’t there in the memory. What do we recollect exactly? The sensations are not reproduced. And yet, an emotional tone or color is evoked, something weightless or heavy, pleasant or unpleasant, and I can summon it. I remember lying in bed with Felix. But is it one time or is it many times merged together from the early days of our clutching love, when I ached for his touch? I know I held his head sometimes when we fucked. I know I put my lips to his ear afterward and whispered words long forgotten, probably stupid words. But do I really remember a single time, the once only? Yes, in the Regina in Paris, with the uncomfortable beds we had to push together. Five stars and those beds. I think I remember the line of light between the heavy curtains as I sat on top of him, banging him. Long ago.

I remember coldness, too, his back to me. The distance between us, his eyes dead to me. I remember this: at a dinner. Where was it? The caustic joke about marriage, not ours, of course, but the institution in general. What were his words? I can’t remember. I recall I started, looked at him. In my mind I see a plate with a gold rim. He turned his head. Now it returns with the memory, pain, perhaps not as acute, but pain arrives with a recollection so vague it has almost disappeared—there was a joke, a plate, a look, and a cutting pain. Is pain more durable than joy in memory?

What moron said the past was dead? The past is not dead. Its phantoms own us. They own me. They have a stranglehold on me, but I don’t know if the revenants can be dispelled. Maybe I will consult with Radish. Maybe she will have some good advice for me. I will just have to keep working—the studio is burgeoning with the unseen works, the myriad monstrosities by someone named Harriet Burden. Maybe when the revelation comes the proverbial scales will fall from their eyes. Maybe when I’m dead some wandering art critic will come to the building where the goods are stored and look, really look, because the person (me) will finally be missing. Yes, nodding wisely, my imaginary critic will stare for a long time and then utter, here is something, something good. Rescued from oblivion like Judith Leyster.
^X
Then again, what if it’s all crap anyway, despite my precious pseudonyms—the ones they desire, rather than me, not me. I am going to be sixty. Maisie has said she will throw a birthday party, and I have said, yes, but only for the dear hearts—no outlying friends of friends. Phinny wants to shop for a dress for me to wear when I turn the corner of another decade, something “ravishing,” he says.

Felix in dreams. Another Felix—hateful. He was never hateful in life—cool, closed, but not hateful. Why does he come?

But tonight, as I sit here at my desk and look out at the water—at winter, at the night, at the shining city—I feel a grief that has no object I can name, not Felix or my father or my mother. Just now, it came hard upon me, the grievous ache, but for what? Is it simply that there is so much less in front of me than behind me? Is it for the child called Harriet who walked with her head down? Is it for the old woman I am becoming? Is it because the fury of ambition has not been beaten out of me, not yet? Is it for the ghosts that have left their tracks inside me?

Yes, Harry, it’s the ghosts. But are names ghosts, too, insubstantial? Did you want to see your name in lights, up on the marquee? Vanity of vanities. The letters assigned to you at birth, designation of your paternity. Paternal lights? Is that what you hoped for? But why, Harry? Your father did not want the Burden born, his squalling burdensome little Burden, but there you were.

He came around.

Did he, Harry? Did he, really? Not to your satisfaction, I would say. Didn’t he prefer Felix? Didn’t even your mother favor Felix? Didn’t she say to you, You mustn’t be too hard on Felix? Didn’t she fuss over him, protect him?

Yes, but she loved me.

Yes, she did. But your work?

She didn’t understand my work.

It’s coming up, Harry, the blind and boiling, the insane rage that has been building and building since you walked with your head down and didn’t even know it. You are not sorry any longer, old girl, or ashamed for knocking at the door. It is not shameful to knock, Harry. You are rising up against the patriarchs and their minions, and you, Harry, you are the image of their fear. Medea, mad with vengeance. That little monster has climbed out of the box, hasn’t it? It isn’t nearly grown yet, not nearly grown. After Phinny, there will be one more. There will be three, just as in the fairy tales. Three masks of different hues and countenances, so that the story will have its perfect form. Three masks, three wishes, always three. And the story will have bloody teeth.