The Blazing World (5 page)

But then came the loneliness at night, the restless wanting that reminded me of my years alone in my first apartment in the city when I was at Cooper Union. I was hurled back to my young self—the solitary girl artist with vague cravings for a future that somehow involved both fame and love. I began to understand that the feelings I had assigned to my youth were not really about that time of life. The agitation I felt after a long day of work was the same disquiet I had felt as a person who had barely emerged from childhood. I pined for a Someone, a potential personage to fill up the remaining hours. Felix, old friend and interlocutor, delicate, evasive, acerbic, philandering, kind Felix was gone. You’ve driven me to my wits’ end! (I had been a sometime screamer.) But that end had never been reached. My wits had stayed, and so had his, and we had repaired the damage to them regularly. There was no fixing anymore. No fixing. No Felix. I struggled to comprehend the void, and the fact that I had begun to register it as real took the form of that empty other being, a lacuna, a hole in the mind, but it was not the hole named Felix.

And so I’d walk over to Sunny’s Bar, where I’d sit and look at the people and listen to them talk, a balm of voices. Sometimes there was music. Once I heard a poetry reading and afterward talked to the poet, who had big eyes and red lipstick, much younger even than Ethan, and, although I found her poems terrible, I rather liked her. She called herself April Rain, an idea I supposed had come to her while writing. The girl had a large duffel bag with a gaping zipper, and she had tied a couple of sweaters and a hat on to it, and when she picked up the load and began to walk, I told her she looked like an immigrant staggering off the pier in 1867, and she explained to me that she was sleeping on a friend’s sofa because she was “between places,” and I took her home.

April Rain, little white girl with bird tattoos on her lower arms and quantities of shattered glass in her poems that occasionally caused bleeding, was my first artist in residence. She didn’t stay more than a week. One night she found a disheveled beau at Sunny’s and never returned, but while she lasted, I liked having her around, and her presence staved off the jostling pains of evening. While looking at Ms. Rain’s soft pale face and plump cheeks as we ate our lentils or roasted vegetables (she was vegetarian) and chatted about Hildegard of Bingen or Christopher Smart, I forgot what I looked like. I forgot that I had wrinkles, breasts that needed a mighty brassiere to hold them up, and a middle-aged gut that protruded like a melon. This amnesia is our phenomenology of the everyday—we don’t see ourselves—and what we see becomes us while we’re looking at it. One night after saying good night to my twenty-two-year-old bardess, I looked in the mirror before bed, surprised myself with my own face, and burst into tears. Felix loved this aging mug, I thought. He praised it and stroked it. There’s no one to love it now.

It may have been self-pity—the sense that I had grown too ugly to warm up any man’s bed—that lay behind the idea that some of my constructed beings needed to have a bit of heat. My mother had had a penchant for electric mattress pads that toasted her through the night; the problem, as she explained it, was her circulation and ossified feet.
My blood doesn’t run; it crawls, and it seems never to arrive at my toes.
My parents’ pad had two settings, one for each side of the bed. She would set hers on six and make sure my father’s side was turned off so he didn’t cook in his sleep. After he died, she raised her level to ten, but she left his side cold, a memorial chill. No extra technology was required for my carcasses, although I fiddled with the wiring before I was truly happy with it. I began with a life-size effigy of Felix; it was an idea of him, not a likeness, his slender stuffed form covered with material I painted in blues and greens with a little yellow and dabs of red, man as canvas, but I added short white hair on the top of his head. When I plugged him in, his soft body ran a fever.

The pleasure this gave me was ludicrous. I couldn’t say then why the hot creature filled me with joy, but it did. I touched his colored sides gingerly to feel his warmth. I put my arms around him. I sat him next to me on the sofa. I called him my transitional object. Aven adored him. Ethan hated him. Maisie tolerated him. Rachel was both amused by and serious about him and the others. She wanted me to try for a gallery again, to go out like Willie Loman and hawk my wares and get attention, attention. But hadn’t they given their verdict over and over again? No one wanted Mrs. Lord’s handicrafts and dollies. Who was I, St. Sebastian?

I was telling Dr. Fertig about my heating mechanism for the bodies when the obvious reason for my elation came to me. Anima. Animate.

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

It was preposterous. Harry Burden, demigod of the studio, trying to resurrect her dead husband and father over and over again, the machinery of grief churning away as she sewed and stuffed and wired and sawed and molded and soldered, but it helped. It helped, and I had come to a pass where I accepted help in all forms.

After a year of frantic spousal and paternal or perhaps spouernal creation, I began to muse about the creatures that lived in my memory, not only actual persons, but those borrowed from my vast collection of books. I don’t mean just characters but ideas, voices, shapes, figures, articulated thoughts, unarticulated feelings. I would call them metamorphs, and they would be cool or warm or hot or room temperature.

It may have been April Rain who told some of the other young stragglers around the neighborhood that I had rooms and beds to spare, but it’s more likely that it was Edgar Holloway III, a refugee from the Upper East Side and musician friend of Ethan’s, several years out of college, who sought work to supplement his rock ’n’ roll dreams. Edgar became my construction assistant. A stocky boy with an upturned nose that looked too small for his face, he was strong, docile, and a quick study when it came to materials and building. He was remarkably dull when it came to conversation, however, but this liberated me from any need to entertain him or explicate the meanings of my rooms or the critters I was putting inside them. I wasn’t sure what I was doing anyway.

What I did know was that I had been sitting on myself for years and that something had happened to me. Dr. Fertig used the word
inhibition
. I had become less inhibited, untied and unfettered. I could thank all the vomiting. The symptom had prompted the talk and the turn. I had become Harriet Unbound, only fifty-five then, but counting, and I did wonder about other paths, the alternative existences, the other Harry Burden who might have, could have, should have unleashed herself earlier, or a Harry Burden who had looked like April Rain, petite and pinkish, or a Harry who had been born a boy, a real Harry, not a Harriet. I would have made a strapping young man with my height and wild hair. Hadn’t I heard my mother bemoan all those inches wasted on a girl? The thought of another body, another style of being haunted me. Was this a form of regret? I wondered what my consciousness would feel like in Edgar’s body. I certainly did not want Edgar’s mind, filled to the brim with techno bands and run-on sentences with the word
man
popping up in them as continual, meaningless punctuation. The fantasy that began to take shape revolved around possible trajectories for me, an artist of multifarious shapes.

I suspected that if I had come in another package my work might have been embraced or, at least, approached with greater seriousness. I didn’t believe that there had been a plot against me. Much of prejudice is unconscious. What appears on the surface is an unidentified aversion, which is then justified in some rational way. Perhaps being ignored is worse—that look of boredom in the eyes of the other person, that assurance that nothing from me could be of any possible interest. Nevertheless, I had hoarded my direct hits and humiliations, and they had made me gun-shy.

Not to my face: That’s Felix Lord’s wife. She makes dollhouses. Titters.

To my face: I heard that Jonathan took your work because he’s a friend of Felix. Plus they needed a woman in the stable.

In a rag:
The show at Jonathan Palmer by Harriet Burden, wife of legendary art dealer Felix Lord, consists of small architectural works cluttered with various figures and texts. The work has no discipline or focus and seems to be an odd blend of pretentiousness and naïveté. One can only wonder why these pieces were deemed worthy of exhibition.
^III

Time had made the feelings worse, not better. Despite Rachel’s prompting that I return to the fray, I knew that youth was the desired commodity and that, despite the Guerrilla Girls, it was still better to have a penis.
^IV
I was over the hill and had never had a penis. It was too late for me to go as myself. I had disappeared for good, and the ease with which I had done so had made it clear to me how shallow my relations had been with all of them. They had come to the memorial service, or at least some of them had. By the time he died, Felix’s heyday had passed. He had become historical, the dealer to P. and L. and T. of days gone by. His wife was ahistorical, but what if I could return as another person? I began to make up stories of ingenious disguise. Like a latter-day Holmes, I would dissolve into my costumes and fool even the children and Rachel with my clever personas. I drew images of possible Harrys: Superman Harry with cape; homeless, sexually ambiguous Harry hauling bottles; old man dandy Harry with short, neat white beard; Harry as male cross-dresser (quite convincing); Harry grinning with modest-size-in-the-Hellenic-tradition male genitalia. And I took some inspiration from the past:

[An] His[toric]al and Phy[s]ic[al] Dissertation on the Case of Catherine Vizzani, containing the Adventures of a Young Woman, born at Rome, who for eight years passed in the Habit of a Man, was killed for an Amour with a young Lady; and being found on Dissection, a true Virgin, narrowly escaped being treated as a Saint by the Populace. With some curious and anatomical Remarks on the Nature and Existence of the Hymen. By Giovanni Bianchi, Professor of Anatomy at Sienna, the Surgeon who dissected her. To which are added, certain needful Remarks by the English Editor. (London: Meyer, 1751)

Not long after Professor Bianchi’s treatise was published in England, translated and edited by John Cleland, the notorious author of
Fanny Hill
, Charles d’Eon de Beaumont, French diplomat, spy, and captain of the dragoons, began to appear in public wearing women’s clothing. He explained that he had been raised as a boy but was in fact a woman. She published a memoir called
La Vie militaire, politique et privée de Madmoiselle d’Eon.
At her death, she was discovered to have male genitalia.

There was also the remarkable case of Dr. James Barry, who entered medical school at the University of Edinburgh in 1809, passed his examination for the Royal College of Surgeons in England in 1813, became a surgeon in the military, traveled from post to post, and rose through the ranks. When his career ended, he was inspector general in charge of military hospitals in Canada. He died in London in 1865 from dysentery. It was then discovered that he had been a she. Barred from medicine by her sex, she had changed it.

Billie Tipton, successful jazz musician, born Dorothy Lucille Tipton in 1914, was denied a spot in her high school band because she was a girl, began performing as a man, and then moved entirely into a masculine life, had a long-term relationship with one Kitty Oakes, a former stripper, and adopted three sons with her. None of them knew until his death in 1989 that anatomically Billie had been a woman.

There are many stories and as many reasons for leaving the feminine behind and adopting the masculine, or dropping either one for the other, as was convenient. There were women who followed their husbands to war and fought to be near them, and women who fought purely from patriotic fervor and, after the battle, returned to being women. There were women who posed as men to inherit their fathers’ fortunes and women who had lost everything—husbands and children and money—who felt too vulnerable to go on as women and turned themselves into men. Many of them had sympathetic mothers and fathers and siblings and friends who kept their secret. Some garments, a name, a differently inflected voice, and the gestures to go with them were all that was required. After a time being a man became effortless. Moreover, it became real.

But was I interested in experimenting with my own body, strapping down my boobs and packing my pants? Did I want to live as a man? No. What interested me were perceptions and their mutability, the fact that we mostly see what we expect to see. Didn’t the Harry I saw in the mirror change enough as it was? I often wondered if I could truly see myself at all. One day I found myself all-right-looking and relatively slim—for me, that is—and the next day I saw a sagging, bulbous grotesque. How could one account for the change except with the thought that self-image is unreliable at best? No, I wanted to leave my body out of it and take artistic excursions behind other names, and I wanted more than a “George Eliot” as cover. I wanted my own indirect communications à la Kierkegaard, whose masks clashed and fought, works in which the ironies were thick and thin and nearly invisible. Where would I find a Victor Eremita, an A and a B, a Judge William, a Johannes de Silentio, a Constantin Constantius, a Vigilius Haufniensis, a Nicolaus Notabene, a Hilarius Bookbinder, an Inter et Inter, a Johannes Climacus, and an Anti-Climacus all my own?
^V
How such transformations could be achieved in my case was fuzzy at best: no more than mental doodles, but I found them fertile.