The Blazing World (33 page)

June 5, 2001

On Nantucket alone, and I miss Bruno. He is with his “girls.” The wary Jenny, the pregnant Liza (bearing first grandchild), and the adoring Cleo. They keep their distance from their father’s lover, and I realized a few weeks ago I don’t care. They do not have to like me. Maisie and Oscar and Aven will come next week. Ethan may come. My son: Mr. Maybe. I long for signs of affection from my buttoned-up boy. I imagine the great long hug, a sudden blurting of love and admiration for me, his ma, but that is not his way. I cannot remake Ethan. Like me, he reads. He reads all the time, and he reads women these days, Simone Weil, Suzanne Langer, Frances Yates. Hope for the earth. But he is severe, an avenger of the downtrodden, an enemy of the system. Sell the Nantucket house! Sell the art! Divest and scatter the funds for redistribution. Ethan Lord in sackcloth and ashes. There are days when he reminds me of a Jesuit priest performing the spiritual exercises over and over as purification. And I founder and fall, unclean and guilty. Mercifully, today on the phone, he hopped off the track and asked me if I’d ever read Bachelard’s
The Poetics of Reverie
, and I quoted a line to him: “Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young.” And Ethan chuckled and said, But I think you have to be old to know that. And I received the chuckle as love.

Little Ethan marches into the house after a day at kindergarten. I see him carry a stack of puzzles into his closet, turn on the light, sit down, and close the door behind him. I know what he is doing. He begins one, finishes it, and starts the next. After half an hour, I knock gently on the door and call out to him in my cartoon voice, Any reports from the closet? Twelve, he sings back at me, or fourteen, or sixteen.

Felix speaks in the darkness of the bedroom: “Do you think the child is normal?”

Yes, yes, yes, I would say. He just has a different pattern of mind.

Many shades of Felix in the house: both caresses and slaps. His wellies stand in the hallway, and I conjure his ghost heading for the beach in an icy rain, and I remember how it aroused me to see the Felix of suits and ties in an old sweater and blue jeans, that here on Nantucket he was nearly another man when he was not on the telephone. Today I touched the stones that are still piled in the wide, shallow crystal bowl on the dresser, a little dusty. He gathered them one by one over the years. He liked to cover them with water to bring out their color. Last year, I did not even notice them, did not think of them. This year I am all wounded feeling as I look down at the stones. I remember throwing a magazine at him and his surprised look. Pay attention! I yelled. It’s time you paid attention. The collage of photographs in the kitchen: Ethan and fish—the terrified six-year-old hoists a small bluefish in the air. A radiant Maisie in her father’s arms, her upper lip a little moist with dirt and snot. Felix is turned to her, reflective, soft, the corner of his mouth raised. This house. I am wading in the ruins of was.

Rune arrives tomorrow. It would have been silly to keep the visit from Bruno, so I didn’t. A long weekend. Thursday to Sunday. Project talk. I want to study him further. He is right for the part, but I must discover the work.

Remember: Straight Wharf tomorrow for swordfish, bluefish pâté, those little crackers.

I’ve been watching
The Diary
. It goes on and on. There is too much to see. The visual glut of too much.

A moment when I stopped the movie: a lackey is filming Rune at a party. That means there are two cameras. One seen. One invisible. Rune is smiling, gesticulating. His eyes narrow in interest as he chats up a woman with a magenta bob and narrow green glasses. He laughs, a big cackle, waves goodbye, and turns toward the unseen camera. But in his face there is no sign of the animation immediately past. The transition is too violent. Our feelings usually linger for a few seconds anyway. I ask myself what lies under his conviviality.

Thursday, June 7, 2001

I picked him up at the airport at 1:30, and his big smile and broad wave made me feel instantly guilty about the thoughts I had last night. He teased me about my truck, my beloved junk heap, but it runs and runs.

Praise for the house—a real beach house, not a McMansion, not an overblown summer place like some of those horrors in the Hamptons. I showed him the studio. Showed him some of my little people in the chorus for
Blazing
. All their mouths are open in song.

Ate the swordfish with relish and drank wine. We looked out onto the beach and the tall moving grasses that grew nearly black against the night sky, a cobalt blue—straight from the tube. Only a few moments of strangeness when I thought, What is he doing here? What am I doing? Maybe I am the mad scientist.

I watched Rune move. I remarked silently on his grace. This is helpful in the world—grace. His left hand (I understood today that he is left-handed) flies out open-palmed for emphasis, and his speech rolls out of him, not too fast, and with little emotion. His voice is low and soothing, and he smiles only at long intervals, but when he does, it feels as if I am being rewarded. He is curious and has read all kinds of books, but it is not what he says that seduces. It is his belief in his own power to seduce.

After dinner, we lay on the two red sofas in the living room. He smoked, and I inhaled the smell of cigarettes, an odor reminiscent of my marriage. I have learned that there is no debate of ideas with Rune, no point for a rational point to be made between us. He is a man of the scattershot and sporadic, of apt quotations, remembered dates, unlikely pairings, and non sequiturs. April 1938: Eight days after Austria voted for the German Anschluss, Superman made his first appearance on the American stage. The Marquis de Sade, he informed me, was born on June 2, 1740. The very next day, June 3, King Frederick the Great of Prussia ascended the throne and, as one of his first decrees, abolished torture. I am not surprised that Rune takes a fashionable interest in Sade, in desire as repetition, in bodies as machines, in the man’s bleak extension of Enlightenment clockwork to sexuality. Do you fancy yourself a libertine? I asked him. And he said no, just an information-processing machine with inputs and outputs attached to a potent sex drive. He quoted Nietzsche: “Man is something to be overcome.” (He is loose and fast with Nietzsche.)

In a single beat, he jumped to J. G. Ballard and the man’s 1970 exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Lab. Better than Duchamp, better than Warhol, he said.
Crashed Cars
is the art exhibit
par excellence
. Ballard’s book
Crash
heralded “the new sublime,” an erotic explosion of metal and glass and dismemberment. But more than the glories of the smash-up, Ballard was a soothsayer, a juggernaut, a harbinger of what was still to come. Hadn’t art museums become Disney palaces, just as he had predicted? Hadn’t the oracle said, “Sooner or later, everything turns into television”?
^I
Hadn’t he said, “In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one’s legs will have more significance than all the pages in
War and Peace
”?
^II
When I wondered what the latter statement meant, Rune said, Isn’t it obvious? I said, Not at all, not at all, but he had moved on to Philip K. Dick and all things Phildickian, and how he loved him, too, another great shaman of our age, born in 1928, dead in 1982, still young, only fifty-four—a paranoid, addicted, five times married, hallucinating, quasi-religious maniac, but oh so wonderful. Hadn’t Dick said, “Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked”?

I asked him if Dick had advocated a three-value logic. Boolean logic has two values, too, I said, essential to computing. Three values includes true, false, and the unknown or ambiguous. Was that what he had proposed? Was he thinking larger? About Gödel’s incompleteness theory? Does he really understand it?
^III

Rune is used to impressing people with such statements but unused to defending them. Despite his ignorance, he just grins, extends his open palm, and tells me I’m too serious.

What if I were like that? What if I just waved contradictions aside? It would be pleasant to play the blasé hero, bloated with himself, collecting admiring glances for the half-baked and the ill-conceived.

I see my father in my mind. Your logic, Father, was about the consistency of relations, not the murk of so-called real life. It was bounded logic. That was its problem. Your true and false propositions function perfectly in their own hermetic sphere.

It is a mistake to apply logic to human life as a whole, to think logic will “wake up” machines.

But then Rune relates that once upon a time there were two Dicks, Philip K. and his twin, Jane Charlotte, who died when she was six weeks old, and the little girl ghost haunted the brother’s writing. Philip K., it seems, blamed his mother for Jane’s death. The foul womb killed his sister? He had been in there with her, after all. The mother had neglected her for him? Alas, I didn’t get the details. Rune was on a roll.

The dead girl child led us to mirrors and doubles and ghosts that never leave us, and the old story about the two sexes as the cleaved halves of a single whole being. He told me about his sister Kirsten, to whom he had always told his secrets. They had invented a code when they were children to send messages to each other their parents couldn’t read, and they called the code Runsten. They had built a fort from boxes and scrap lumber, and inside their fort they had dissected the body of a dead baby bird. And I told him about my mother’s miscarriages and that I had always wondered if my father hadn’t wanted a boy. Maybe one of those who had died had been a boy.

Later, he rattled on about artists I’d never heard of, and I understood he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the now—what’s in the Chelsea galleries this minute. It was impressive, but after a while my mind left his words for my own silent ones, the ones who think they have a right to be young and wander off to look for new meanings, and I interrupted him at one point to bring up our work. I said the project would have to disguise the line of suture, the incision between his art and mine. I had to know more about him. It was a question of becoming.

Becoming me?

No, I said to him, double consciousness. You and I together. I am hoping you will goad me into something else. My voice rose. Goad me into the dizziness of exile.

His face went dead, blank, as I had seen him on the film. No answer.

With your name on my work, I said, it will
be
different. Art lives in its perception only. You are the last of three, and you are the pinnacle. I could hear the cracking passion in my voice. I altered my tone to one of calm deliberation.

He liked the idea of pulling a fast one, but my ideas felt outdated, a little lame to him. We live in a postfeminist age of gender freedom, transsexuality. Who cares which is which? There are lots of women in art now. Where is the battle?

No, I said to him, it’s more than sex. It’s an experiment, a whole story I am making. Two down, one to go. After that, I retire from the game. We will find a project, I said. Hadn’t his work
The Banality of Glamour
focused mostly on women’s faces and bodies
?
Surely he knew that women face pressures men don’t. I had suffered from the cruelty of the beauty culture. I knew what I was talking about.