The Blazing World

Maisie Lord (edited transcript)

No one could have been less like my father than Bruno Kleinfeld. When Mother told me she was seeing someone, I was happy for her, but when I first met Bruno, I was surprised. Bruno knows all this, so I’m not going to upset him. My father was immaculate; Bruno is rumpled. My father never swore; Bruno swears all the time. My father liked tennis; Bruno likes baseball. My father floated; Bruno tromps. It’s funny because Bruno is a poet, and my father was an art dealer, and the stereotypes are that poets are cloud people and business types are grounded in the nitty-gritty of trade and money. I could go on and on about their differences, but I won’t. All I know is that my mother was different with Bruno. She was freer. She told jokes, teased him, pinched his cheeks, and he gave it back to her. They reminded me of Ernie and Bert or Laurel and Hardy, a wisecracking pair of screwballs. They were embarrassing, to be honest, but you’d have to blind and deaf not to see and hear that they were in love with each other.

I think it was seeing my mother with Bruno that started me thinking about my parents again, about who they actually were, not who I thought they were. My father made mysteries around him. That was his gift, his charisma. He always made you feel that he had a secret in his pocket or a trick up his sleeve. I was his daughter, and I felt it all the time. I saw the way people were drawn to him. Like me, I think they wanted him to smile, which he did, but only now and then. Sometimes I think he held it back on purpose.

For him, art was the enchanted part of life, the part of life in which anything can happen. He especially loved painting, and he was extremely sensitive to forms and color and feeling, but he always said beauty alone wasn’t enough. Beauty could be thin and dry and dull. He looked for “thought and viscera” in the same work, but he knew that wasn’t enough to sell it either. In order to sell art, you had to “create desire,” and “desire,” he said, “cannot be satisfied because then it’s no longer desire.” The thing that is truly wanted must always be missing. “Art dealers have to be magicians of hunger.”

My father called himself a “rootless cosmopolitan” and said that he had learned how to play the part from the very best teachers — his parents. As a child, they had lived in Jakarta and Paris and Rome and Hong Kong and Bangkok. I never met my English grandfather, but my grandmother was an aristocratic Thai lady, somehow related to the royal family (which isn’t too hard, since the king always had many wives). After my grandfather died, she settled in Paris in a big apartment in the Sixteenth, with tall windows and high ceilings, and one of those cage elevators that lurches upward after you push the button. I was four or maybe five before I knew that Khun Ya was Father’s mother. I knew about my other grandparents because my mother called them Mother and Father, but Khun Ya was not like them at all. For one thing, she always glittered with jewels. For another, she moved slowly and deliberately and spoke with a British accent and had nothing to do with the grandmother I had in New York.

The winter after I turned ten, we were in Paris for the holidays. It was a day before Christmas, and it was raining, I remember that gray Paris rain. Khun Ya said she had something for me and led me to her bedroom. I had never been inside that room; it was a little scary, actually, to find myself in there, with her big carved wooden bed and all her shining private things and the strong smells. She had lots of powders and unguents in glass bowls and bottles. She opened up a box lined with yellow silk and removed a small ring — two golden hands grasping a small ruby — which she gave to me. I didn’t hug her as I would have hugged my other grandmother, but I smiled and thanked her. Then she put her hands on my shoulders, turned me to the long mirror, and told me to look. I did. I felt one of her fingers press me near the top of my spine. She took my shoulders, pulled them back, let go, and stepped away from me. I knew she wanted me to hold the pose. “Now your chin,” she said. “Bring it up to lengthen your neck. You must learn, Maisie, how to command attention in a room. Your mother cannot teach you.”

I wore the ring, but I never told anyone what Khun Ya had said, and every time I looked down at those tiny gold hands, I felt disloyal to my mother, and I worried about it. Even though I couldn’t see exactly why Khun Ya thought standing up straight would command a room’s attention, her words of damnation, “Your mother cannot teach you,” were clear enough. Khun Ya was stepping in because she felt my mother was inadequate. I should have defended Mother, but I didn’t, and I felt like a traitor. I was thirteen when Khun Ya died suddenly on the operating table during surgery for her hip, and I didn’t feel much except vague amazement, and then I felt bad because I thought I should have been much, much sadder. She was my grandmother, after all. Ethan was sad. I think he cried in his closet. But then, Khun Ya loved Ethan. He commanded her attention all right, whether he was crumpled over or standing ramrod straight. The funeral was in Paris, and there were lots of strangers and flowers and heavy scents from women in stiff black suits with hard rows of glittering buttons.

After she died, my father showed me an album with photographs of his parents and some clippings he had brought from Paris. I saw how beautiful my grandmother had been. “She held court,” he said. She was quick with languages and spoke French, Italian, English, some Cantonese, and, of course, Thai. But wherever they went, my father said, she would learn just enough to say something charming and win over a guest. “She was clever but not thorough. What counted was the effect, not the knowledge, très mondaine.” And then he said something I never forgot. “In that way, I am like my mother. But I fell in love with your mother because she is exactly the opposite. She is deep and thorough and cares only about the questions she keeps trying to answer for herself. The world has little use for people like your mother, but her time will come.”

Children desperately want their parents to love each other. At least I did as a child. His words stayed with me as only a few sentences do over the course of a lifetime. A writer, whose name I can’t remember now, called these verbal memories “brain tattoos.” Mostly, we forget what people say, or we remember the gist of it, but I believe I have retained Father’s words exactly. I puzzled over them a lot. He had told me that he loved in my mother what he thought he himself lacked, a kind of depth, I guess. Worse, perhaps, he had said that the world didn’t have use for people like my mother. It — the world — preferred people like my father and grandmother. And yet, I felt that he thought my mother’s way was superior. Most important, I felt that he loved her for it. But then again, if he was so aware of not having it, I couldn’t help wondering if he didn’t have more of it than he thought he had. “Khun Ya didn’t like Mother, did she?” I asked him. I remember he looked surprised, but then he answered me. He said they came from different worlds. He said that Harriet had unsettled his mother’s expectations, and he smiled his smile and said, “Maisie, Maisie, Maisie.”

I didn’t know my father had lovers then. I didn’t know until much later. My mother talked openly about it only near the end of her life. There had been both men and women. She wanted to tell me and Ethan that she had known about the affairs, not all the details, but she had known. It had hurt her, but she never once feared she would lose him, “not once.” In their last years together, there had been no one but her. “We found each other again, and then he died.”

I remember a set of keys lying on a table in the hallway of our apartment. I remember looking at the foreign keys, and my father scooping them up swiftly, casually, and stuffing them in his pocket.

I remember standing outside my father’s study while he was on the telephone. I remember his low voice. I remember the words our place.

I know now that it’s easier to be disappointed by a spouse than by your parents. It must be because, at least in early childhood, parents are gods. They slowly become human over time, and it’s kind of sad, really, when they diminish into plain old mortals. Ethan says that I have a stupid bone that acts up regularly. He thinks I’m stupid about our parents. When he was fourteen, he says, he realized that our mère and our père—he says that to be clever and remote — were frozen against each other, two icicles. He didn’t like to be at home and stayed away a lot. I don’t remember it that way. I think it was much more complicated, and I’ve come to think that my father needed my mother more than she needed him. And I think she knew it.

Three days before my father died, Oscar and I had dinner with my parents. I was pregnant, and we talked about “the baby” a lot. Mother had been reading studies about infant development, about newborns and their capacities to imitate the facial expressions of adults, for example. I didn’t follow all the details she cited, which had to do with systems in our brains, but I remember I was very excited by something she called amodal perception — the different senses are crossed in babies, touch and hearing and sight and maybe smell, too. (I can’t tell you how many times I wrote down the names of books my mother gave me and then never read them. Oh well.) She talked more about visual development and cultural-language influences on perception, too, that we learn to see, and that much of that learning becomes unconscious. I sensed there was an urgent reason for her studies. She was trying to figure out why people see what they see.

Making documentary films means, at least in part, choosing how to see something, so I found the conversation compelling. Editing is the most obvious way of manipulating vision. And yet, the camera sometimes sees what you don’t — a person in the background, for example, or an object moving in the wind. I like these accidents. My first full-length film, Esperanza, was about a woman I befriended on the Lower East Side when I was a film student at NYU. Experanza had hoarded nearly all the portable objects she had touched every day for thirty years: the Chock Full O’ Nuts paper coffee cups, copies of the Daily News, magazines, gum wrappers, price tags, receipts, rubber bands, plastic bags from the 99-cent store where she did most of her shopping, piles of clothes, torn towels, and bric-a-brac she had found in the street. Esperanza’s apartment consisted of floor-to-ceiling stacks of stuff. At first sight, the crowded apartment appeared to be pure chaos, but Esperanza explained to me that her piles were not random. Her paper cups had their own corner. These crenellated towers of yellowing, disintegrating waxed cardboard stood next to piles of newspapers. The woman had also gathered bits and pieces of twine, ribbon, string, and wire on her journeys around the city and knotted the pieces together into a gigantic hairy, multicolored ball. She told me she just liked to do it. “It’s my way, that’s all.”

One evening, however, while I was watching the footage from a day’s filming, I found myself scrutinizing a pile of rags beside Esperanza’s mattress. I noticed that there were objects carefully tucked in among the fraying bits of colored cloth: rows of pencils, stones, matchbooks, business cards. It was this sighting that led to the “explanation.” She was keenly aware that the world at large disapproved of her “lifestyle,” and that there was little room left for her in the apartment, but when I asked her about the objects among the rags, she said that she wanted to “keep them safe and sound.” The rags were beds for the things. “Both the beds and the ones that lay down on them,” she told me, “are nice and comfy.”

It turned out that Esperanza felt for each and every thing she saved, as if the tags and torn sweaters and dishes and postcards and newspapers and toys and rags were imbued with thoughts and feelings. After she saw the film, my mother said that Esperanza appeared to believe in a form of “panpsychism.” Mother said this meant that mind is a fundamental feature of the universe and exists in everything, from stones to people. She said Spinoza subscribed to this view, and “it was a perfectly legitimate philosophical position.” Esperanza didn’t know anything about Spinoza. I’m aware that my film is a tangent, but I’m talking about it because I think it’s important. My mother believed and I believe in really looking hard at things because, after a while, what you see isn’t at all what you thought you were seeing just a short time before. Looking at any person or object carefully means that it will become increasingly strange, and you will see more and more. I wanted my film about this lonely woman to break down visual and cultural clichés, to be an intimate portrait, not a piece of leering voyeurism about a woman’s horrible accumulations.

My parents first saw Esperanza at a screening in 1991. Father was polite, but I think the images of the woman’s squalor pained him. He found the subject matter “difficult.” He also said he was glad celluloid didn’t smell. He had a point. Esperanza’s apartment stank. My mother loved the film, and although she routinely cheered on my ventures, I knew her enthusiasm was real. My father’s reticence hurt me, and I suppose bringing up Esperanza again at the dinner amounted to a challenge. I wanted to show him that I had known what I was doing, that I had an aesthetic point of view. Oscar talked about hoarding, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and my father noted with some amusement that two years after he had seen my film, he saw Anselm Kiefer’s Twenty Years of Solitude, a work that included stacks of books and papers stained with the artist’s semen, and he had thought of my film. Kiefer’s masturbatory remnants had been mostly met with embarrassment or silence in the art world. Father offered that the woman’s piles of junk were no more disturbing than Keifer’s “private ejaculations.”

My parents disagreed about the semen stains. My mother wondered why the personal theme of the work should be shunned, why a man’s masturbation, his loneliness and sadness were somehow outside “art.” She was emphatic. She said you had to make a distinction between what you saw — stains — and its identification as human waste. My father found the stain business self-indulgent and repugnant. Oscar, who is usually pretty phlegmatic, said the work sounded stupid, really stupid. I said I wasn’t sure, I hadn’t seen the show. This meant that my mother was alone defending semen against two men, who had been producing it regularly over the years. I remember thinking it was fortunate that their emissions had hit the mark at least a couple of times. Mother worked herself up, becoming both more articulate and more irritated. My father’s age-old technique was simply to change the subject, which would further infuriate my mother, who would then cry out, “Why don’t you answer me?”

I was twenty-six years old, married and pregnant, and still I found the tension between my parents intolerable. My mother hung on to her passionate defense while my father, embarrassed, glanced around the room and wished she would stop. A thousand times I had witnessed the same scene, and each one of those times, I had felt my own anxiety mount until it felt as if I would break into pieces. Anselm Kiefer’s semen wasn’t really the issue, of course. After all the years of their marriage, my parents continued to misread each other. My father didn’t like conflict in any form, and so, when my mother came out swinging, he ducked. My mother, in turn, interpreted his avoidance as condescension, and it drove her to punch harder. I understood them both. My father could be maddeningly evasive and my mother annoyingly persistent.

Their verbal brawl ended when I yelled, “Stop it!” My mother apologized by kissing my cheek and neck, and we all recovered pretty quickly from the dried-semen debate, but I did notice that my father’s face was drawn and tired, and that the age difference between my parents had begun to show. Mother looked robust and still young, and Father a bit wizened and white. After dinner, he smoked a cigarette as always and then another and another. I had given up nagging him to quit. The smoking Dunhill was part of his body, his posture, two fingers aloft, smoke circling in the vicinity of his face. It was also the only sign that my father was nervous. Nothing else about him was nervous. He didn’t jiggle or tap or tic. He was calm and contained always, but he smoked, as they say, like a chimney.

After dinner, we went into the other room for a brandy, which my mother and I did not drink, but Oscar and my father did. My mother was silent then, as she often was, weary, I think, from her heated defense of sperm art and content to listen. There were candles and a vase with peach-colored roses on the low table and some chocolates. I remember these details because it was the last time I saw my father alive. Every moment during that evening has become magnified by his death. I didn’t expect to lose him. I thought he would be a grandfather to my child, and I believed my parents would fight on, would annoy each other for many more years and grow old and crotchety together. Isn’t it funny how we just think things will go on as they are?

I can’t remember how we strayed onto ghosts and magic, but it wasn’t very far from our earlier themes: my Lower East Side panpsychist’s collection and an artist’s peculiar habit of saving bodily fluids on paper, as if the marks that remained had some mysterious value or power. My mother said that when she was a girl, she used to look at her dolls in the morning to see if they had moved at night. She had half hoped and half feared they would come alive. Then my father brought up Uncle and his spirits. Uncle had worked for my great-grandparents in Chiang Mai, a skinny but muscular old man, covered from his neck to his feet with tattoos that had wrinkled along with his thin brown skin, and whose teeth had turned black from chewing betel nuts. I had heard about Uncle since I was a child. I had seen pictures of my great-grandparents’ beautiful old house, which rose up from stilts with its gabled roof and curving eaves, and the spacious grounds Uncle had tended.

My father’s eyes narrowed as he told the story. He was ten years old and living with his grandparents in Chiang Mai while his mother and father “traveled.” He had never known why they left him. Neither of his parents had ever given him a straight answer, but his childhood had always involved traveling and multiple nannies, all of whom had dropped hints about his mother’s “adventures” and given him pitying looks.

My father’s big room had a view of the garden and was visited regularly by small gray lizards, and a boy, Arthit, who worked for the family, had slept on a palette at the foot of my father’s bed, for company, because Thais never slept in a room alone. My father had followed Uncle around without being able to converse much with him, but as his Thai improved, he began to understand the old animist’s stories. Uncle told him about a beautiful girl whose fiancé had drowned in the Mekong River. Distraught with grief, she hanged herself, and after that her spirit haunted a tree. Uncle had seen her, a floating head only — dangling entrails from the neck. He also told my father about a ghost his mother had heard and seen, a fetal ghost that cried out in the forest from the place where his mother had miscarried him, a half-formed little monster that sought revenge for his early end by harassing the living.

One day, Uncle drove my father home to his village north of Chiang Mai. He remembered that when he arrived, children had come running and that they chattered and laughed about his light hair, which reminded them of phee, the spirits.

He said that the people he met had been kind to him, but he had felt like a curiosity, a thing on display, and that, most disturbingly, Uncle had turned into another man. All his obsequious mannerisms, his smiles and bows, vanished. He retired to a corner of his sister’s house, poured himself a glass of whiskey, and waved my father away from him. It was still daylight when Uncle’s sister took him to a thatched hut on poles near the river. Men drummed and played instruments, and then the women began to dance, slowly, rhythmically. He was told the ghosts were on their shoulders, riding them like horses. A very old woman with a cigar in her mouth was waving her arms over her head and puffing out smoke as her eyes rolled upward into her head, and then she moved in on my father, her mouth open, and blew smoke right into his face. He had the feeling he couldn’t breathe, gasped for air, and after that, his memory went to pieces.

All he was certain of, he said, was that, at some point, he came down with a high fever that lasted two days. He remembered screams, rolling around on a floor, choking terror, and what he thought was a whip hitting him or someone else, and then the sun through a windshield, tires jolting over a road, clouds of ochre dust. He must have hallucinated the body of a child burning next to his bed and dark birds streaming through the window. He thought he remembered a man beside him, and lying in a cold bath. On the third day, he came out of it. He was in his own room in Chiang Mai. An amulet of the Buddha was hanging around his neck, but he had no idea how it had gotten there.

He never saw Uncle again. When he asked his grandmother what had happened to him, she said he had retired. Mai pen rai. It doesn’t matter. Father wondered if he had been drugged or whether he had simply fallen ill. He had been suspicious, worried that the grown-ups had hidden something from him. He checked his whole body for signs of a beating, but there was nothing. “It must all have been a fever dream,” he said, “but it frightened me. I couldn’t decide what was real and what wasn’t, and no one would tell me.” Then he said, “Secrets and silences and more secrets and more silences.”

“You never told me,” my mother said in a low voice. Her face was all squashed with sympathy. Watching her, I realized how that same look, when it was directed at me, drove me crazy. Too much empathy is annoying, but I’ve never understood why. You’d think it would be nice. Maybe it’s just mothers. You don’t want them that close. At the same time, I wondered if Khun Ya had ever looked at my father like that. I had the sudden thought that she might have preferred him as a grown-up.

What had he meant about more secrets and more silences? Why didn’t I ask him? Have I thought about this more since I’ve known about my father’s erotic life? He had secrets, too, secrets and silences. Why had he never told my mother that story? I sometimes wonder if I really knew him at all.

Oscar thinks my parents were both odd people. Once he used the word decadent to describe my father and neurotic for my mother. He thinks Ethan is very smart but “falls into the high autistic spectrum somewhere,” and he likes to call me the “fairly well-adjusted” one. He married the “fairly well-adjusted” one in the family. He thinks Father’s money protected us from the “real world,” that if we had been poor, our lives would have been very different. He is right about that. Still, he knows that real is not my favorite word. It’s all real — wealth, poverty, livers, hearts, thoughts, and art. (My mother used to say: Beware of naïve realism. Who knows what real is?) And then Oscar always looks at me and says, “Do my job for a day, and you’ll see what I mean.” He does his therapy with kids in foster care in a miserable little office in Brooklyn with a broken desk. The kids he sees are not adjusted at all, because their lives have been bollixed up, often from the very beginning. I fell in love with Oscar because he is devoted to his work, and he has lots of stories to tell. Oscar doesn’t care much about art. Maybe that’s my rebellion. I married a man who doesn’t give a hoot about paintings or sculptures and goes to the movies to be entertained.