The Blazing World

by Siri Hustvedt

  Back to The Suffocation Rooms: I’m proud of what I gave them, my own twists and turns, but it was Harry’s work. It was her idea that the viewer should shrink each time he or she opened a door and entered a new room. The rooms were nearly identical, the same grim-looking table and two chairs with vinyl seats, the same breakfast dishes laid out on the table, the same wallpaper made of Harry’s and my own handwriting and some doodles (I had free rein here to put in all my secret messages), and the same two metamorphs in each room. At the beginning of the journey, the furniture fit your median-size adult—we decided on five-seven—but with each consecutive room, the table and chairs, the cups and plates and bowls and spoons, the writing on the wallpaper grew that much larger, so that by the time you hit the seventh room, the scale of the furniture had turned you into a toddler. The soft, stuffed metamorphs grew, too, and they got progressively hotter. The seventh room felt like a Finnish sauna. After a discussion we decided that the single divided window in every room should be a mirror—more claustrophobic that way.

  And then there was “the box.” Unlike all the other objects in the rooms, the box did not grow; it stayed the same size. Harry found a beaten-up wooden trunk with a lid and a lock and had six more made for her by some fabricator in Brooklyn. She was finicky as hell about it and sent one of them back five times before she was satisfied with the “distressing.”

  I was the bright boy behind the color changes. I thought each room’s palette and its two characters should get a bit darker—moving from creamy white to a dusky caramel. And we decided to age the rooms. Each one should look a little older and worn than the one before, with furniture a bit more dilapidated, so we orchestrated stains, and scratched and ripped the wallpaper until by the last room you find yourself in a soiled, dingy, fraying kitchen parlor. Time had to get to the creatures, too, so Harry wrinkled up their foreheads, sagged their jaws, and pinched their necks.

  We had a high time as wrecking crew. I recall the routine with affection. “Hand me the knife, P., old pal,” she would say. I would bow to her politely and produce the weapon. She would bow back to me and then impale the vinyl seat of one of the big chairs. I would congratulate her, “Well done, H., my buddy bud.” And she would say, “Your turn. A touch of dirt, P., chum of mine, should do the trick.” And I’d smear a wall or table with some mud we had prepared. Harry and I were co-stars in our own early talkie, a comedy team, P. and H. We had fun with pH, the sign of our togetherness and camaraderie.

  pH: measure of acidity or alkalinity of a solution. We liked to say we leaned toward the acid. pH = –log [H+]: the logarithmic measure of hydrogen ion concentration as defined by the Danish biochemist Søren Sørensen. Many log jokes flew, including that it was short for what we produced: logorreah. We were the two halves of the Ph in PhD: philosophiae and D as in Daddy, and as in dead. We made up other initialisms on the spot: prurient hiccoughs—let your imagination run wild—peeping harlot, potted harridan, puckish hard-on, peevish huckster, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Sometimes we worked in costume, as two men, as two women, as a man and a woman, or reversed. The fat poet took a picture of the two of us in drag, but I don’t think he liked it. He liked his lady friend as his lady friend. Bruno has a macho streak. Nevertheless, Harry and I made the perfect drag couple. Big Harry and little ol’ me.

  One day, while we were working on the rooms, she put down the screwdriver she was holding and looked at me with her serious face. “You know, P., my dear,” she said, “I like playing with you. I feel as if I’ve found the real playmate I wanted all those years ago when I was a kid, not imaginary, but real. I didn’t really have anybody until Rachel came along. You’re like the friend I dreamed of back then come to life.”

  It’s not my way to be sticky, so I batted her off with a josh and a jest, and she laughed. But alone in bed, I remembered her words, and I remembered Devereaux Lewis, his hand on my head and his knee in my back, pushing my face in the dirt, moaning faggot, pansy, fluff. And Letty, with her big, tearful eyes, staring at me afterward. I should have smashed his head in, but I was too noble and too fearful. And then I saw myself lying in my bed jerking off to those dream boys in my head, and the God guilt, and the loneliness. Harry had been another one, not a homo, just a lonely kid. She had liked her mother and I still liked mine—conflicts notwithstanding. At least she had known her father. Mine was a fantasy man, a row of facts I shuffled around like cards. White boy orphaned at ten; ward of the state; made good, studied accounting in college; fell for Mama, ambitious nursing student, married, divorced, died.

  The box had to open, open very slowly, a little more in each room. We discovered later that the bulk of our visitors didn’t even notice the change until about the fourth room. Harry knew there had to be a body in there, a being trying to get out. The “emergence” had humor, but it was dark humor. We called the being “it” and “the demon” and “the hungry child.” Harry drew and drew, trying to find its face, its body, its look. The metamorphs were big, goofy-looking, lumpy things, who sat at their tables in all seven rooms with only minor changes in their positions, but the little one, according to Harry, had to come from “another plane of existence.” Wax. She decided on beeswax. She was inspired, she said, by several sources—the bizarre anatomical wax sculptures of La Specola Museum in Florence from the eighteenth century, with its skinned and opened bodies that displayed systems and organs, the sacro monte above Varallo with its lifelike figures, and Japanese ghost-scroll images. Because she did not want the person to look like an alien in some 1950s sci-fi film, the model became more and more realistic: skinny, eerily transparent (liver, heart, stomach, and intestines just barely visible), hermaphroditic (small breast buds and not-yet-grown penis), frizzy red human hair. The creature is strangely beautiful, and when you see him/her in the seventh room out of the box, standing on a stool to look out the window, or rather into the mirror, you can’t help feeling touched somehow. The really large (by now) metamorphs have finally noticed that the personage is out and have turned their heads to look at it.

  What does it mean? That’s what they asked me when the rooms were exhibited. It means what you feel, I said, whatever you feel. It means what you think it means. I was cryptic. I put on a mask, not literally, but one of my actor masks, a persona. It was a great role because it mixed me with Harry. I even took on some of her gestures for my gig in the theatrum mundi. When Harry waxed philosophical, she fluttered her hands and sometimes curled her right fist and punched the air to give her point zing. With a few borrowed gestures from Harry, a modified accent, less Virginia, and an altogether butchier me, P. Q. Eldridge strode into the art world.

  Harry knew whom to schmooze. She knew where to go and where to send me. She introduced me to the right people at “art” parties, gallery owners and collectors and critics I charmed and chatted with, and I made her connections mine. It isn’t a “nice” world, but then, no world is. I did meet some artists I still see, people who turned into friends; but, all in all, the scene made me think that the Frenchman Honoré de Balzac had it right: the grubby human comedy. Illusion upon illusion upon illusion. It was all names and money, money and names, more money and more names.

  I met Oswald Case, now author of the sensational real-life thriller Martyred for Art, at several openings, a midget, poor guy, not a true little person, but he topped off at about five-two, I’d say. Full of himself. Bow tie. Every time I met him he told me about Yale, Yale this, and Yale that. And movie stars. Steve Martin. He knew Steve Martin; what an eye he has, so sure. “He owns a Hopper, did you know that?” No, I didn’t know. “The price? Millions.” (I have forgotten how many millions.)

  “Yes, my husband and I have been collecting for years now,” a woman in a Chanel suit told me. “We just bought a Kara Walker.” (The idea here: Tell black artist about another black artist.) “Her work is soooo powerful, don’t you think?” “Yes,” I said, “I think so.” “We’re eclectic, you see,” she said, before her
head swiveled toward a known person across the room, called to him, “David, dear! Excuse me, I see a friend, sooo nice talking to you.”

  And so it went. I had fun and I had boredom. For Harry, it was more complicated.

  It was true they didn’t want Harry the artist. I began to see that up close. She was old news, if she had ever been news at all. She was Felix Lord’s widow. It all worked against her, but then Harry scared them off. She knew too much, had read too much, was too tall, hated almost everything that was written about art, and she corrected people’s errors. Harry told me she never used to set people straight. For years she had sat by, silently listening to people mess up references and dates and artists’ names, but by then she had had it. She said she had been released by Dr. F., a figure I began to think was an invisible man behind Harry. Harry credited the invisible man with permission. She now permitted herself to say what she had suppressed earlier: “I think you mean so-and-so,” she would say, and people inevitably gave her that and-who-are-you? glance. Some of them fought back, telling her she was wrong—and then the battle started. Harry had stopped backing down.

  But Harriet Burden’s status rose, anyway, not as an artist but as a player in the who’s-somebody-and-who’s-nobody game of New York City. She had hidden from “all that” since Felix Lord died, had shunned the whosits and whatsits, the dukes and duchesses of moolah, the muckety-mucks with acquired tastes. But now she was back in it, not as Felix Lord’s “hostess by marriage” (Harry’s phrase) but on her own. The whosits and whatsits liked Harry as a promoter, liked her as a rich champion of young, talented artists, and as a collector. (No one knew that her first “discovery,” Anton Tish, had absconded. They guessed he was hard at work on another show.) Harry played the part. She put on her own mask, and once it was on, she got better at the role, more confident. It suited her. In fact, she was more truthful. “I thought that article was complete rubbish,” she told a woman who had carefully marked her copy of Art Assembly with Post-its. And she started buying art, mostly by women. It’s brilliant, she said about a canvas by Margaret Bowland, and it’s a bargain.

  “Hats, Harry,” I said to her one Sunday afternoon at the lodge.

  “Hats?”

  “That’s what you need.” I told her that she should always make her entrance with a hat. She groaned over this suggestion as too pretentious, too absurd, but then I bought her one, a taupe fedora, and she looked wunderbar, as Dieter likes to say, and so H.B.’s signature look was born. She came to like the headwear. “It covers up my unattractive mind,” she would say; “all those unpleasant ideas nobody wants to hear me talk about.”

  But, you see, Harry was free to comment on her own work as if it belonged to me, and she knew just what to say. She wasn’t putting herself forward, after all. She was speaking up for P. Q. Eldridge, that “highly interesting” performance artist who had branched out into another medium. “He stages mysterious stories,” she would say, smiling, “visual elaborations of his work as a performer.” And she could push Ethan. “You should read the article about Phinny’s act in The Neo-Situationist Bugle—the cultural construction of race and gender and ambiguity as the ultimate subversion, fascinating.”

  As time went on, we made more works, some of them real collaborations. We designed smaller rooms with itsy-bitsy figures and somewhat larger ones. None of them told clear stories. They were all as murky as dreams. I thought up one called Guns and Cleavage for a three-by-four-foot room. We used bits and pieces of images from kung fu, blaxploitation, and old Westerns. We added some shots from Japanese pink movies, and Russ Meyer stills to cover the walls, floor, and ceiling. White or black or yellow, tits, ass, and firearms fuel the movies. BANG, BANG, STAB, SLASH, BOOM, CRASH. I cut down the pictures to their essences—six-shooters blazing, automatic weapons cradled like babies in male arms with burgeoning biceps, Elizabeth Taylor’s cleavage in Cleopatra, but also the built-up boobs or buttocks of starlets. Some of the fragments were cut so small they became abstract. Lying on the floor of this sex-and-violence burlesque are two little brown kids in pajamas with feet, both protectively holding their crotches. (Made me think of me and Letty.)

  The Bandage House was another collaboration. We took a small, crooked house with miserable pieces of furniture in it that Harry had built and covered it with torn white gauze, inside and out, but through the material you can see on the walls and floors and the roof discolorations and marks that make you think of bruises, scrapes, wounds, and scars. At first we had some farblondzhet little folks inside it, but we took them out. It had to be empty.

  Countless cocktail parties and openings later, we landed a show at the Alex Begley Gallery. When The Suffocation Rooms were shown, they were read through me—P. Q. Eldridge was exploring his identity in his art. White boys, the Anton Tishes of the world, have no need to explore their identities, of course. What is there to explore? They are the neutral universal entity, the unhyphenated humans. I was pretty much all hyphen.

  There was a further reading, however. The show was mounted the spring after New York was attacked, and the little mutant that crawled out of the box had the haunting look of a damaged survivor or a new being born in the wreckage. It didn’t matter that the work had been finished well before 9/11. The increasing heat in the rooms contributed to the interpretation; the last, hot room felt ominous. At the same time, my debut was an insignificant casualty of the falling towers. There were a few articles, mostly good notices, but the show was probably even more marginal than it might have been. By the time the rooms were truly recognized, it was too late for Harry.

  But back then, she watched it all. She told me that Anton had called her his fairy godmother, and she was mine, too, I suppose. She stood in the corner wearing a hat and watched the spectacle she had made unfold before her. A white, half-Jewish woman became a black, gay, male artist of some small notice, causing a little stir among sophisticated black and/or gay or both people, but white heterosexual people, too. Without the latter it’s back to a ghetto, an art ghetto, but a ghetto nevertheless. I did not give up my job as H/Lester, but I stopped working five days a week and cut down to three. The show’s audience had grown because art world types had started to drift in to see the fighting, dancing, dueling duo. It’s all a vanity fair.

  No one saw it then, but Harry and I recorded our story in full on the wallpaper of The Suffocation Rooms. We mixed in the narrative of P.Q. as Harry’s mask with automatic writing, scribbles, doodles, and some palimpsest effects—writing over what we had written—but it’s all there. Unread for years. Phineas Q. Eldridge is really Harriet Burden was written on the walls in several places. P.Q.E. = H.B. Harry described the phenomenon as “inattentional blindness.” She read a lot of science papers, but what it meant was simple: People don’t see things that are right in front of their eyes unless they pay attention to them. That’s how magic works—sleight-of-hand tricks, for example. Harry was ready to tell the world, but nobody was ready for her confession.

  One night I heard her crying on Bruno. They were in her bedroom, but her sobs were loud. Then came his hush-hush, it’s-okay voice. Bruno didn’t like the experiment at all. They had verbal knockdowns over it. But I disagreed. I wasn’t an art expert then, and I’m not one now, but I defend our act, if that’s what you want to call it. To be really seen, Harry had to be invisible. It’s Harry crawling out of that box—thin-skinned, part girl/part boy little Harriet-Harry. I knew that. It’s a self-portrait.

  Why some artworks create such a big fuss is a conundrum. First the idea spreads like a cold and then people spend money on it. Mine-is-bigger-than-yours goes a long way among collectors in that world, maybe in every world. I never knew Rune—that one-name-only artist—who agreed to be Harry’s third pseudonym. I first saw the art world glamour-puss at the Reim Gallery. I think that’s where Harry first ran into him, too, although I’ve heard several versions of their first meeting, and I could be wrong. I’d read about him on Page Six in
the Post, knew he had made it big, but the only works I’d seen were the crosses. He churned out one after another. They resembled the Red Cross sign but were multicolored in flat acrylic. A yellow one had sold for a mint because he had made only one. You can say whatever you want about something so simple, build it up or tear it down, but Rune promoted the Christian symbol as pop icon, as another hot commodity on the art market. The congregants back home at Calvary Pentecostal might have cried blasphemy, but it’s unlikely they’ll ever hear about Rune’s paintings. Fame is a relative term.