The Blazing World: A Novel Page 3

  Clark: Listen, I’ve said this before. It’s all very well and good to look back now and ask how on earth we could have been taken in. You can cite all the examples you want. I wasn’t pondering how he did it. He gave me the work. It caused a stir. It sold. I visited his studio and there were works in progress all over the place. What would you have thought?

  Hess: I’m not sure.

  Clark: There’s nothing cut-and-dried about this, you know. One can easily argue that the posing, the performance, was part of the work itself, that it all goes together, and as you well know, pieces from that show signed by Anton Tish command high prices. I don’t regret for a second that I showed them.

  Hess: I think the real question is: Would you have shown them if you had been aware of who had really made them?

  Clark: I believe I would have. Yes, I think I would have.

  Maisie Lord

  (edited transcript)

  After she moved to Brooklyn, my mother collected strays—human strays, not animals. Every time I went to visit her, there seemed to be another “assistant,” poet, drifter, or just plain charity case living in one of the rooms, and I worried they might take advantage of her, rob her, or even kill her in her sleep. I worry too much; it’s chronic. I became the worrier in the family—my job. The man who called himself the Barometer lived with Mother for a long time. He had spent two weeks in Bellevue not long before he landed on her doorstep. He rattled on about the words of the winds and made peculiar gestures to lower the humidity. When I mentioned my anxiety about him to my mother, she said, “But, Maisie, he’s a gentle person, and he draws very well.” She was right about him, as it turned out. He became the subject of one of my films, but there were other, more fleeting and unsavory characters who kept me up at night until Phineas came along and put her affairs in order, but that was later. My mother’s place was immense, an old warehouse building. She had two floors, one to live in and one to work in. When she renovated the place, she made sure there were several bedrooms for “all my future grandchildren,” but I think she also had a fantasy about supporting young artists directly, putting them up, giving them space to work in. My father had his foundation. My mother had her ad hoc Red Hook artists’ colony.

  Not long after she moved, my mother said to me, “Maisie, I can fly.” Her energy was up, to say the least. I read somewhere about hypomania, and I asked myself if my mother might not be hypomanic. Mourning can be complicated by all kinds of nervous ups and downs, and she was really sick after my father died. She was so weak and thin, she could hardly move, but after she recovered, she didn’t stop. My mother worked long hours in her studio every day, and after that she read for two or three hours, one book after another, novels, philosophy, art, and science. She kept journals and notebooks. She bought herself one of those big, heavy punching bags and hired a woman named Wanda to give her some boxing lessons. Sometimes I felt limp just looking at her. She’d always had a streak of fierceness in her—she could explode suddenly over a trivial incident. Once when she had asked me to brush my teeth and I dawdled—I must have been about seven—she lost it. She yelled and screamed and pressed an entire tube of toothpaste into the sink. But most of the time she was a patient mother to me and my brother. She was the one who read to us and sang to us, who made up long stories that satisfied both me and Ethan, not an easy task, because I wanted fairies and goblins, and he wanted vehicles that released various weapons and robots, so she would make a hybrid. For a whole year, she told us a long saga about the Fervidlies, who lived in a country called Fervid. Lots of magic and fights and elaborate weaponry. She helped us with our homework all through high school. I’d call her from college, too, and ask her questions about my classes or papers. My mother was interested in everything, and she seemed to have read everything. She was the one who attended our games, recitals, and plays. My father came when he could, but he traveled a lot. Sometimes, when I was little, I would go in and sleep with my mother when he was gone. She talked in her sleep. I don’t know why I remember, but once she yelled out, “Where’s Felix now?”

  Children are selfish. I knew my mother was an artist who made intricate houses filled with dolls and ghosts and animals she sometimes let me touch, but I never thought of her work as a job. She was my mother. My father called her his Madonna of the Mind. It’s awful when I think about it, but it never occurred to me that my mother was frustrated or unhappy. The endless rejection must have hurt her, the injustice of it, but I can’t say I felt it when I was a child. She liked to hum and sway when she worked on one of her constructions, and she’d waggle her fingers over a figure before she touched it. Sometimes she sniffed the materials and sighed. She’d close her eyes from time to time and liked to say that there was no art for her without the body and the rhythms of the body. Of course, when I was a teenager, I found these gestures and tics excruciating, and I tried to make sure none of my friends witnessed them. When I was seventeen she once said to me, “Maisie, you’re lucky you didn’t get my breasts. Big breasts on a little woman are fetching; big breasts on a big woman are scary—to men, that is.” It hit me that she felt her womanliness, her body, her size had somehow interfered with her life. This was long before the pseudonyms, and I was busy making my first little film in high school, a visual diary, I called it—very pretentious, lots of long, moody shots of my friends walking down the street or sitting in their rooms at home in states of existential anguish, that sort of thing. What did my breasts have to do with it?

  Much, much later, when it came out, I had the sickening thought that she had been right. Of course, by then I was an adult and had run into my share of belittlement and prejudice with my own work. I believed she used those men as fronts to prove a point, and she did, at least in part, but when I read the fragment of her memoir and the journals, I saw how complicated her involvements with them had been and that the masks were real, too. She’s been terribly misunderstood. She was not a calculating beast exploiting people right and left. I don’t think anybody really knows when she first started thinking about pseudonyms. She published one dense art review under the name Roger Raison in a magazine in the eighties, dumping on the Baudrillard craze, demolishing his simulacra argument, but few people paid attention. I remember when I was fifteen, our family was in Lisbon, and she went over and kissed the statue of Pessoa. My mother told me to read him, and, of course, he was famous for what he called his heteronyms. She was also deeply influenced by Kierkegaard. No doubt her urge to be other people went back to her childhood. My mother’s best friend, Rachel Briefman, is a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst. She is probably right that psychotherapy unleashed a Harriet Burden none of us had ever seen before, as well as a number of other characters or personas she had been sitting on for quite some time. I don’t mean as in multiple personalities but as in protean artist selves, selves that popped out and needed bodies. I could never have said any of this even a year ago, but slowly I’ve come to see my mother in a different light, or maybe, I should say, several different lights.

  But that’s happened over the years. When I first saw Memorial Dream, I was unprepared. It shocked me. One Sunday I brought my daughter, Aven, to Red Hook for brunch. My husband, Oscar, didn’t come along. I can’t remember why. He probably had to write a report on one of the kids he works with. (He has a PhD in psychology and sees private patients, but he also spends time with foster children in the system, for which he is paid next to nothing.) If Mother had any strays at the time, none of them was around. Aven had just started to walk then, so it must have been the spring of 1996, and we had an eventful meal because my daughter spent every minute walking, or rather walking and falling, walking again and falling again. My mother clapped and laughed, and Aven was delighted, showing off more and more until she exhausted herself, sobbed, and I settled her in for a nap on a sofa surrounded by pillows to keep her from falling off. My mother had many pillows, in both muted and bright colors. She used to talk about color and meaning. Color, she said, has corporeal meaning. Before
we can name the color we’re seeing, it’s in us.

  Where was I? When Aven woke up, my mother told me she wanted to show me something she had been working on, and she took me to the far end of her studio space, which was still under construction at the time. She had built a little room with translucent glass walls the color of milk. I could see a figure through the wall and all at once I understood I was looking at my father seated in a chair. The likeness must have been in the figure’s posture, because when Mother pushed open a nearly invisible door, the soft stuffed body that had looked so much like Father had only blunt features, but it was wearing one of my father’s suits and Don Quixote was open in its lap, the book my father loved most. When I looked down, I saw that the floor was plastered with papers, Xeroxes, memoranda, notes my father had taken, and that my mother’s own handwriting was scrawled on the red linoleum squares. And there were three miniature stairways that jutted upward and ended against the three walls. Five doors had been crudely drawn onto one of the walls. I burst into tears. Then Aven started crying, and my mother tried to repair the situation. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” That was typical. She couldn’t bear to see people distressed. It affected her physically. She would clutch her rib cage as if someone had hit her.

  We all recovered, but before I left in a car service with Aven, my mother looked me in the eyes. It was a severe look, not cold but strict, the way she sometimes looked at me when I was small and had lied or cheated or hit Ethan.

  I remember it because I felt guilty, although I wasn’t sure why. She closed her eyes, then she opened them, and in a calm low voice said, “I’m sorry you were unsettled, Maisie, but I’m not sorry I made him. There are more dreams, I’m afraid, and they must out.” She smiled sadly and escorted us down to the waiting car.

  I can still see her as she turned away from us. I wish I had filmed her then. It’s beautiful out there by the water with the view of the Statue of Liberty, but it was desolate, too, bleaker then than it is now, and the sight of my mother striding away from us toward the brick building under a big cloudy sky made me feel that I was losing her. I used to feel that way after I said goodbye to her at my summer camp. And then—it was just a minor thing—I noticed that she was letting her hair grow, and it looked like a small wild bush on top of her head.

  Harriet Burden

  Notebook C

  Where did they come from? The penis with wings, his penis, the empty suit jackets and pants aloft and running with Felix paraphernalia—reading glasses, cologne, gleaming nail file (file X), a blank canvas (hope)—the giant Felix squashed into one of my rooms like Alice, the tiny Felixes lined up in a row, clad in various outfits, husband dolls, I called them. Somehow my father began to come in, too. The book man sleeping on a page of Spinoza, skipping over Leibniz (he loved Leibniz), a small daddy Luftmensch hovering just above a flight of stairs, words inscribed all over his two-piece suit. The elusive one, my elusive ones, began to mingle in the drawings and the sculptures, their faces and their clothes, mergings of desire, maddening beloveds mixed up in Harry’s mind. And anger, too, at their power over me. That’s why they grew and shrank.

  I didn’t know how to make my mother. That would come later. There was some problem rendering a person I had once been inside.

  I did not have to chase her.

  I chased the men howling Look at me!

  Knowledge.I Husserl’s student Edith Stein is the best philosopher on the subject, and she lived it, lived her words.II Philosophy is hard to picture. I began to wonder if I could represent empathy, for example, build an empathy box. I doodled possible forms for the inside. I made notes. I hummed. I listened to the St. Matthew Passion a lot. I understood that my freedom had arrived. There was nothing and no one in my way except the burden of Burden herself. The wide-open future, the great yawn of absence, made me dizzy, anxious, and, occasionally, high, as if I had doped myself, but I hadn’t. I was the ruler of my own little Brooklyn fiefdom, a rich widow woman, long past babies and toddlers and teenagers, and my brain was fat with ideas.

  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.