The Blazing World: A Novel Read online

  Harriet and I were “good girls,” high-achieving, cooperative students who might as well have had gold and silver stars plastered to our foreheads; but my best friend’s character had a saintly streak I lacked, a rigid moral imperative that probably came from her Protestant father. I liked Professor Burden. Remote as he was, he was never less than kind to me, and when he talked to us, I remember that the corner of one side of his mouth would often move upward in an expression of amused irony, but he rarely showed his teeth. Unlike my expansive, loudmouthed father (who had his own problems), Harriet’s father was physically awkward, prone to self-conscious pats of his daughter’s arm or quick, hard hugs that were more like speeding collisions than expressions of affection. When he stood up from a chair, he seemed to rise for a long time, and when he was finally erect, he loomed over us, a rangy, thin, pale, balding being. He liked to expound to us on philosophy and politics in a language that was often beyond our comprehension, but Harriet would listen to him rapt, as if God himself were talking. I don’t remember any self-righteousness in his speeches. He believed in tolerance and academic freedom, and, like my own parents, he railed against the monstrosity that was the Red Scare. But it is not what is said that makes us who we are. More often it is what remains unspoken. Even as a girl I felt the coiled-up tension in the man as he sat in his large chair, his long fingers curled around a martini with two olives. As far as I could tell, his thoughts were usually elsewhere.

  As little children during the war, Harriet and I had lived without our fathers, and we remembered their return. My father never saw combat, but Professor Burden had been part of an intelligence unit in Europe. According to Harriet, he had never said a word to her about it, not one word. Once, when she asked him about those years, he picked up a book and began to read, as if the words had never come out of her mouth. Before he went off to war, he married, and Harriet knew that her father had alienated his family because the girl of his dreams was Jewish. It wasn’t a permanent rift; the Burdens came to nominally accept Ruth Fine and their granddaughter, but the Burdens were snobs—pure and simple. No money, but heaps of old-money notions that included an unarticulated anti-Semitism. Although Harriet’s father had rejected the pinched world of his parents, he was nevertheless its product. He worked long hours, was meticulous, dutiful, and self-punishing. Praise for his wife and daughter was meted out in small, grudging doses. I never saw him irritable or angry, but then, his self-restraint was so powerful it prevented all spontaneity. It was her father who came up with the nickname “Harry.” As a psychoanalyst, it is hard for me not to see a wish parading openly in the “pet” name.

  I marveled at the absence of all bickering and banter in the Burden household. Ruth yelled at Harry from time to time, but never at her husband. My own parents were subject to regular melees followed by periods of standoff, and although their struggles often pained me terribly, I was more accustomed to conflict at home than Harriet was. (I also had two brothers who were masters of the choke hold.) A young person always extrapolates human reality from her own life. However anomalous that life may be to others, it is normal for the one who lives inside it every day.

  At the same time, I envied the harmony in the Burden household. Ruth was affable, efficient, and appeared to believe in her wifely duties, not as a yoke but as a calling. She had a sharp sense of humor and was subject to fits of giggling, sometimes so extreme she found it hard to stop. Once, after she dropped a pot roast on the floor of the kitchen and watched it slide with its abundant juices across the floor and hit the leg of a stool, she laughed so hard the tears streamed down her face. After she recovered, Mrs. Burden scooped up the chunk of beef, popped it back into the pan, and “made a few repairs.” We ate the dinner without a word to the patriarch, but Ruth winked at Harry and me throughout the dinner, which gave me a wonderful feeling of conspiracy.

  Because the pot roast chaos was an anomaly in the Burden household, it became an object of hilarity. My own mother, a translator from French and German, worked at our kitchen table. Before we ate dinner, she would shove her manuscripts to one side, and then, when she discovered drips of spaghetti sauce on her pages in the morning, she would yell, “Am I raising pigs in this family?” I now think that Ruth Burden ordered her world to keep anxiety at bay and to preserve the quiescent surface of her husband, who was roiling underneath and drank his three martinis every evening to subdue the rising floods. I liked Mrs. Burden’s touch; it was warm and affectionate, and she lavished it on Harry and sometimes on me. When I spent the night, she would tuck us in, old as we were, and I liked the feel of her hand on my forehead, liked her perfume and the sweetness of her voice saying good night to us.

  After Harriet had Maisie, those passionate maternal emotions, as well as a zeal for order, seemed to take possession of her. She threw herself into motherhood and domesticity in a way that, frankly, startled me. She became her mother, not so easy because she also desperately wanted to be her father—philosopher-king. Harry and I used to meet every week for tea after she had seen her psychotherapist, a colleague of mine, Adam Fertig. One afternoon she rushed in a few minutes late and, apologizing, sat down opposite me. “Rachel,” she said, “isn’t it strange that we don’t know who we are? I mean, we know so little about ourselves it’s shocking. We tell ourselves a story and we go along believing in it, and then, it turns out, it’s the wrong story, which means we’ve lived the wrong life.”

  We talked about our stories that afternoon, about self-deception, and Harry’s fury at her lot. Neither her family story nor cultural politics nor her temperament can explain what happened to her. There are clouds in all of us, and we give names to them, but the names make divisions that aren’t always there. There were storms inside Harry, whirlwinds and tornadoes that went their various destructive ways. Her suffering ran deep, and her suffering did not begin as an adult. I remember her standing in front of the mirror, tears streaming down her face. She was probably fifteen or sixteen. “I hate the way I look. Why did I turn out this way?”

  The popular girls at Hunter bragged on Tuesday about having dates for Friday and Saturday nights. Harry and I pretended to keep ourselves aloof from such petty concerns, but what teenager doesn’t want to be admired and loved? What person, for that matter? I suppose her appearance was the arena where the more pernicious aspects of America touched her—the sense that she was too big to be attractive to men. The truth is Harriet was striking. She had a beautiful, strong, voluptuous body. Men stared at her on the street, but she wasn’t a flirt, and she wasn’t socially graceful or prone to small talk. Harriet was shy and solitary. In company, she was usually quiet, but when she spoke, she was so forceful and intelligent, she frightened people, especially boys her own age. They simply didn’t know what to make of her. Harry sometimes wished she were a boy, and I can say that had she been one, her route would have been easier. Awkward brilliance in a boy is more easily categorized, and it conveys no sexual threat.

  Not long ago, I reread the book Harry loved best when we were in high school: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. We often read the same novels, and the two of us had polished off Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, all of Austen, and much of Dickens by then, but Frankenstein became Harriet’s archetypal text, a fable of the self, a scripture for the reality of Harry Burden. Although I was taken by the story as a foreboding myth about the developments of modern medicine, I did not read it again and again. Dr. Frankenstein and the book’s vapid female characters held little interest for Harry. The person she loved was the monster, and she used to quote long passages from his chapters by heart, declaiming them like an old-fashioned poet, which made me laugh, even though I was bewildered by her fanatical attachment to the Miltonic creature.

  Reading the book again as an adult, however, I felt a door had been opened. I walked through it and found Harry. I found Harry in a novel that had been written by a nineteen-year-old girl on a bet. In 1816, Mary Shelley was spending the summer in Switzerland with her husband, their neighbor Lord Byr
on, and another person less celebrated whose name I cannot remember. The challenge was to write a ghost story for the pleasure of the others. Mary was the only one who fulfilled the bargain. In the preface, she writes that the story came to her in a “waking dream,” as one image after another possessed her. She watched as a “pale student of unhallowed arts” created a monster.

  “Behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.”

  It is impossible to forget the novel’s essential story. I knew the terrible being Frankenstein makes is so lonely and misunderstood that his very existence is cursed. I knew his awful isolation is transformed into vengeance, but I had forgotten, or probably had never felt before, the ferocity of his feeling—his fury, grief, and bloodlust. And then I came across these lines spoken by the monster in Chapter 15:

  “My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions steadily recurred, but I was unable to solve them.”

  I felt as if Harry’s ghost were speaking to me.

  A Compendium of Thirteen

  Characters, a Non Sequitur, a Confession, a Riddle, and Memories for H.B.

  Ethan Lord

  1. How did Gobliatron, hero of the Fervidlies, who inhabit a country far to the north of Nowhere, disentangle himself from the ice-cold clutches of the Bobblehead, a machine man who froze great lakes by looking at them? Bobblehead froze Gobliatron solid with a mere glance. So Gobliatron, stranded in mid-step on a field of ice, began to think hot. He thought so hot he gave himself a fever. The fever melted the ice, and the hero was free.

  2. A word eludes a picture. How do you draw whenever, but, and then, or last week? Arrows.

  3. Red roosters all over pajamas purchased in France that Edward Boyle said belonged on girls. I took a pair of scissors, cut a hole in one leg, and threw the scrap in the garbage. The slashed pajamas disappeared. This is a confession. I was eight.

  4. Riddle: What is so fragile even saying its name can break it?

  Silence. . . . F.L., paterfamilias, asked me this riddle when I was nine. I could not answer him, but after he gave up the secret, I could not stop thinking about the answer. I lay in bed and said Silence again and again to hear it break. You asked me what I was doing, and I told you, and you smiled, but the smile went crooked, and I did not know exactly what it meant.

  5. I remember the closet was my enemy. I remember there was something behind the door. I remember you put a flashlight inside the closet and that, when it burned out, you let me change the batteries.

  6. Everything has a pattern or a rhythm that can be discerned through close attention, but whether those repetitions exist outside the mind is an open question. You and I did not see the same patterns.

  7. “Theory is good but it does not prevent things from happening.” You told me that one month, two days, and thirty-seven minutes before you died. It is a quote from a neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, who dressed in black, admired paintings, and wrote the first descriptive analysis of multiple sclerosis.

  8. Boredom never touched you, except when waiting for suitcases at the airport.

  9. Under the logical fallacy argumentum ad popular, the biggest brand is the best brand. This false reasoning is used by every cultural herd, however large or small. The herd runs to gape at the spectacle of whitening toothpaste. The herd runs to see the new hot gallery star. The herd thinks in unison. The herd is a collective voyeur, driven by received knowledge to see beauty, sophistication, cleverness in the shining thing, the empty vehicle of worth and wealth and glory. But the herd loves ugliness, too: humiliations, murders, suicides, and corpses—not actual corpses within reach, not corpses that stink, but the mediated dead, the dead and dying on screen. The familiar herd, our own herd, is mostly sanitary in its tastes. The herd reads The Gothamite to discover sanitary tastes that will not interfere with the spectacle of whitening toothpaste that brightens its collective Madison Avenue grin and will not sully its Wall Street suit. The herds, large and small, create varying identities through one or another commodity of choice, their raison d’être. Images of the living as well as the dead are sold on the open market as delectable bodies. Their reality is exclusively of the third-person pronominal variety. The bodies have no inside because the first-person singular is not allowed. Value is determined within each herd by collective perception and the number of viewers.

  10. Rubik’s Cube: 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 permutations. You gave it to me because you knew its algorithms would haunt me. M.L., Maisie Lord, aka Twinkletoes, the tutus-and-Mad-Hatter’s-tea-party sibling, did not understand that this was a hexahedral universe to be mastered by movement and color, that it was a cosmology, a separate reality, a place to be. She broke my Rubik’s Cube. I cut off her ponytail. I held the ponytail over the toilet while she screamed. I flushed. The toilet did not want to digest the hair. You came, you looked, you yelled, and while you yelled, you waved your hands beside your ears. Then you brought towels, and you spoke to us about tolerance, but we were not interested in it, not interested in tolerance, that is. We were too old, you said, to be breaking Rubik’s Cubes and flushing ponytails down toilets, and you were dead tired of it—of us. I was eleven and Maisie was thirteen. And then you sat down on the bathroom floor (with the towel that had a beige stripe at one end) even though the floor was not dry. Your head flopped down onto your chest and a sound came from you—a choking sound and sniffs. I froze like Gobliatron. I could not move. Twinkletoes said to me, Now look what you’ve done! Now look what you’ve done! But my mouth was too tight and cold to answer.

  11. Debord, Guy. He invented the Game of War. It was a board game about the Napoleonic Wars. Guy Debord, Julien Sorel, Ethan Lord—all wanting to play the game, move the pieces. Tell me the rules. Men love games. You said that once to me. But you loved games, too.

  12. Ethan Lord, only son of Harriet Burden and Felix Lord, product of aforementioned two persons in nuclear family arrangement, aspirant scribbler, puzzle-maker, neo-Situationist orphan, remembers his mother. I am trying to remember you, Mother, to find those brain scraps and turn them into more than a Humian bundle of impressions, as you would have said, Humian, after David Hume. Kantian and Hegelian, but not Spinozaian, perhaps Husserlian? There is Husserliana, Gesammelte Werke. You would be glad to know that I’ve looked, read a few pages of him. He is difficult. You, too, could be difficult to understand.

  13. Nobisa Notfinger lived in Paciland, a country beside Fervid where the inhabitants were well dressed and serene and followed the rules, but Nobisa had a temper, and she was a messy, dirty, chubby girl, and life was hard for her, and so she left to make her fortune in Fervid. You created Nobisa for Maisie, but you armed her for me. In her trusty brown suitcase she had a ray gun and a sword and a special ear-pincher given to her by the Fairy of Ill-Will and Malice that Nobisa could use only seven times. Maisie doesn’t remember the stories as well as I do. Different patterns of mind.

  Harriet Burden

  Notebook A

  September 25, 1998, 10:00 p.m.

  Vindication of the Rights of Harriet Burden! They have swallowed the Tish shit whole, gulped it down so readily I am dizzy with success, to quote that demon, Joseph Stalin. We have removed the c from his name to make the anagram work. Table no more! The little boy with a few fresh acne scars has whetted their appetites for more Wunderkind works, more smartass jokes with art historical flourishes, and the buffoons are pounding out their enthusiasm in reviews. They haven’t found a tenth of my little witticisms, my references, my puzzles, but who cares? They’ve had little to say about the story boxes, but that only demonstrates their blindness, doesn’t it? The other day one of their ranks showed up at Anton’s, someone Case, a dwarf in a suit and bow tie with anachronistic hair pomade and a fake Brahmin accent that made me wince. He asked me for my “views.” Poor, self-important little man.

  After he left, Anto
n and I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the folding chair in the studio and rock back and forth. We are a team, I told him, a twosome deep in research on the nature of perception: Why do people see what they see? There must be conventions. There must be expectations. We see nothing otherwise; all would be chaos. Types, codes, categories, concepts. I put him in, didn’t I? The fellow in the suit looking oh-so-seriously at immense naked woman. How quick they are to embrace and anoint the smiling young male artist with innocent air; look how knowledgeable, how sophisticated, how clever he is. Big Venus has made a big (little) buzz. I hear the sound of bees, and bees sting. I have told Dr. Fertig that I hate the bees. Hate is not a word I use lightly. He knows that. He knows that the joke is also no joke. He wants to know when I will reveal my identity. The phrase itself is exciting. It makes me feel as if I am living in a thriller. When will I reveal my identity?