The Blazing World

Phineas Q. Eldridge (written statement)

Oscar Wilde once said, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” I played Harriet Burden’s mask briefly, and I do not regret it for a second. From behind my nearsighted, mulatto, queer self she was able to tell a truth. In the gay world, disguise has a long history, which has never been simple, so when Harry asked me to beard for her, it felt as if I were merely tying an extra knot in a very old rope. I am a performer, and I know that my face onstage can often be more intimate and more honest than the one I wear in the wings. But I have also had two identities offstage. In 1995, I slithered out of my first persona, the one I was born with, to become my second self: Phineas Q. Eldridge. The person who preceded P.Q.E., John Whittier, was a good boy, well behaved if a little dreamy, kind to animals, girls, and poor people (in that order), easily frightened, and, to use my mother’s word, “delicate.” I had my first seizure when I was four years old and my last one when I was thirteen. The doctors said I “outgrew” them. They belonged to my earlier, shorter, prepubescent body, the one we all shed, along with small jackets and pants and shirts and shoes that once fit it perfectly. The tremors came mostly at night, and not often, but the odors I sometimes smelled and the crawling sensations I felt and the tinglings and face-twitching and the drools and the blanks and the bed-wetting every night for years surely shaped my sentimental education.

When I think back on that four-eyed, interracial, epileptic kid dancing the tango with his little sister, Letty, in the recreation room of a split-level, solidly middle-class house outside Richmond, Virginia, I don’t find it at all surprising that he took to God even before his mama was reborn. At school I was a pariah, who had never lived down the full-body seizure that took place beside the slide on the playground in the third grade, but at church I shone, a pious little angel with a sacred affliction. Hadn’t St. Paul, father of Christianity itself, fallen down on the road to Damascus in a fit just like the ones I sometimes had? Harry was fascinated by the delicate, skinny, freckle-faced John with his black mother and white father who read a lot of books, watched movies on TV, and made up his own world called Baaltamar, a name plucked from the Bible (Judges), but which, in its first incarnation, looked like a Hollywood stage lot. In Baaltamar, overdressed villains with supernatural powers tangled with one angelic hero, my alter ego, Levolor (named after the window blind company because Levolor has such a pleasing lilt). I spent a lot of time in that magical country, just as Harry had spent a lot of time in her own head with an imaginary companion and a busload of anxieties. She, however, grew up godless.

It was painful to feel God looking in on me every minute, judging my secret thoughts and rambunctious longings as I lay in my bed dreaming I was Levolor, who had taken up singing and dancing and lived in a big pink movie mansion with ten servants. Fans came by the hundreds of thousands to watch me wail out songs and shake my tail feathers and do slides, stomps, and brushes. I used to close my eyes and listen to the crowd thunder its adoration, and then, because it was a selfish, unholy fantasy, I would shift its direction, turning Levolor into a Jesus character who walked around Tinsel Town laying hands on the sick, raising the dead, and magically multiplying crackers and soup for tragically poor people in tattered clothes and shoes with holes in their bottoms. This fantasy, too, had its problems because it wasn’t right to feel too good about being good, and I knew I felt awfully good about my goodness.

Mama’s religion has cooled down considerably, and she’s way too soft a person ever to have been a self-righteous holy roller, but there was a time when she went at her worship with a lot of zeal. My parents separated when I was three and Letty was one. We had a daddy on weekends. My earliest memories are of sitting on his shoulders and looking way down at the grass, a rabbit named Buster who lived in a cage in Daddy’s backyard, the shiny silver watch he let me wear high up on my arm, and pancakes sitting on a blue plate that looked different from Mama’s. I remember that his house smelled funny, and I used to dread he’d pick up the football and suggest a little back-and-forth. When the ball came flying toward my head, I’d duck before I knew what I was doing. The hard, whirring ball frightened me. Later, I trained myself to remain upright and worked hard to catch that damned thing and run like mad. I used to pray to God to help me succeed in my efforts to please my father, to become the coordinated, hearty, real boy he wanted. No doubt I was a disappointment to him. I was not made in his image, but I also think I scared him a little or maybe the epilepsy scared him or the idea that something might happen to me when Mama wasn’t around. He never scolded or harangued me about my athletic shortcomings. I just felt he would have liked a different kind of boy. And yet, when Letty and I spent the night, he used to come into the room, sit beside me, and stare at me while I pretended to sleep. He must have known I was awake, but he never let on that he knew, and all he did was sit there and watch.

Then one day in the spring after I turned eight, my father had a brain aneurysm. The balloon burst, and he died on his sofa alone. He was thirty-one years old. Even though Mama didn’t want him anymore for a husband, his death seemed to paralyze her for a while until the Pentecostal religion of her youth stepped in to take over the blank spot Daddy had created. We changed churches.

They dunked Mama in the baptism pool, and after that she was filled with the Holy Spirit. “And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” Acts, Chapter 2, Verse 4. I know that for outsiders such doings fall into the remote regions of crackpot religiosity, but I loved the hymns and the “Amens” and “You tell ’em, brothers and sisters” during the preaching, and the tongues and the interpretations and the testimonies. Letty and I liked to play church at home because we could bounce and skip and rush around like wild animals hollering out nonsense. All I can say is that the people who were suddenly hit by the Holy Ghost and fell to their knees or collapsed onto the floor and began to speak weren’t fakers, although I did wonder about Sister Eleanor at times, who often seemed overly uplifted, and the language that ran out of her sounded vaguely like pig Latin.

I prayed harder and harder and wondered why God had done it, taken my father, and why my mother had sent him away before he died, and whether his sadness had something to do with the bubble in his brain, because he had seemed sad, especially when he sat by my bed — a heavy gloom moved from him to me and settled in my chest like guilt. Mama used the word incompatible. They hadn’t fit together somehow. After my father’s death, Baaltamar became more elaborate, more violent, and more secret. Slavery emerged as a theme. Levolor led armies against Prince Hadar to free the slaves, who were a combination of black Americans and the Israelites, and I began to draw up battle plans in an imaginary geography. When I close my eyes, I can still see Lake Ashtarot and the river Jeshmoth and a mountain range I named Mizlah. After a time, the populace of Baaltamar discovered sex and went at with biblical abandon. Hadar’s followers often stripped naked and danced to wild music to tantalize Levolor, who had a lot of fun looking on while he nobly resisted their advances. It was inevitable that my hero would give in to temptation, to the sweet jerks and hard rubs under the blanket with a washcloth and the God guilt and the wet wonder and the poetry of it all.

I think it was my stories of Baaltamar that seduced Harry. The imaginary world disappeared about the same time as my seizures, as did the all-seeing God of the Hebrews, but I have kept a tender feeling for people who speak in tongues and for Mama, who never turned away from me, despite the fact that I wandered into a secular wilderness and never returned to the fold. When I arrived at the lodge, Harry was tending to her own characters, a group of stuffed figures — cold, coolish, warm, and hot. I became fond of her “metamorphs” (as Harry called them), even though a good number of them were injured or deformed. I take that back. I liked the hurt metamorphs most, the ones with missing legs and arms, with braces and slings, humps, or rashes painted on them. They did not look real, but they felt more human than a lot of humans I know, and Harry was gentle with her homemade critters. Sometimes she’d make them talk for little Aven, who was just four at the time and used to visit “Gran” on weekends and leave wet spots all over the art from her kisses.

My route to the Red Hook lodge was circuitous. After college, I journeyed to New York City along with legions of fellow aspirants to become a thespian and ended up as a waiter. “Hi, I’m John Whittier. I’ll be your waitperson this evening.” That was the era of broken plates, rude customers, auditions, callbacks, rejections, more rejections, and a few measly parts for a freckle-faced, light-skinned black man who can do any and all accents on request. Auditions are one thing. Auditioning for parts in plays and movies that are so badly written, so poorly conceived, they give you indigestion is another. I decided to write my own material and became a performance artist, Phineas Q. Eldridge, an impoverished one, I’m afraid. I had been dumped by my beau Julius and had fallen from the semisplendor of a Chelsea apartment to my friend Dieter’s couch (a kind of a gutter, as it turned out, with gum wrappers, toothpicks, dust fuzz, and nickels between the cushions).

It was Ethan Lord who came my rescue. My act at the Pink Lagoon had been featured in the Neo-Situationist Bugle, probably the most obscure publication in all of New York City, but Ethan and his friend Lenny cultivated performances like mine for reasons that only a few people in university graduate departments understand. They did not approve of capitalism. This was well before the 2008 smash-up, and shopping was still the national pastime. Of course, the two subversives didn’t appreciate the joys of a brand-new toaster or the feel of a cashmere scarf or what a dab of extremely expensive cologne can do for you psychologically. They were strict, strictly secondhand, thrift-store, vintage boys. It was a matter of principle but also of perversity, one that comes more easily to rich people than to the rest of us. Ethan had a trust fund. Lennie did not, but I gathered that his parents sent him monthly checks.

Despite the fact that the boys were straight, they were advocates of “queer theory,” which was not only for or about homosexuals but could be applied to all manner of persons and things. The point was to “bend the categories.” I was all for that, of course, and they were an earnest, touching pair. Lenny reminded me of an anarchist from the thirties with his round wire-rims, and Ethan, with his large eyes and dark curly hair, seemed to be hiding a sense of humor somewhere, although I wasn’t sure where. When I first met him, he spoke to me about how my act “embodied disruptions of normativity.” They were disruptions lifted directly from my own life. I played versions of my parents, whom I called Hester and Lester, and I played Letty as Hetty, when she was a wild tot and as her grown-up, serious engineer self who doesn’t approve of the fact that I robbed our family story for the theater, and I played my old-soul, epileptic, little-boy self and Sister Eleanor in the grip of her tongues, but always with comic distance, and I did it in costume, cut in half, black and white, man and woman — but the boys were right: By the end of the show all the neat distinctions between one thing and another had gone queer.

Ethan wanted me to meet his mother: waif saver of the universe. I came preapproved because I was technically homeless and because the Bugle had turned H/Lester into a “theoretical construct,” and this had impressed the rag’s nine readers, one of whom was Harry herself. A few days before I met Ms. Burden for the first time, there had been an uproar at the Red Hook lodge. One of Harry’s waifs, named Linda Lee, whose “art” involved cutting her body and taking photographs of the damage, overcut herself in the hallway of the resident artists’ wing and was rushed to Methodist Hospital, where she was patched up, shipped to a psychiatric ward for a week, and then sent home to her mother in Montclair. Apparently, Harry had not understood that the girl’s artistic impulses involved real blood. Ethan might have had his head in cumulus formations, but, as he put it, his mother’s “charitable impulses had to be curbed before disaster struck twice.” He also told me that “one insane person was enough in the place”—a reference to the Barometer, whom I came to know and tolerate.

In short, that is how I assumed the role of master of ceremonies at the Red Hook lodge. Harry had not been paying attention. I told her that she couldn’t take in any piece of trash that came begging at the door. This wasn’t a crib for impoverished tourists, nutcases, slatterns, and junkies, was it? We needed bona fide artistic types who would stay awhile and do some chores. The Barometer was already dug in, and Harry was stuck on the man, whom she believed to be harmless, which he was, mostly, except that he did not wash. It was Maisie who convinced him that a weekly immersion in the tub with a bar of soap was the price he had to pay for his living quarters. Maisie was a sort of specialist in insane people, and she went on to make a film about him called Body Weather, which won a prize at a film festival. I also discovered that the Medeco key to the front door had been copied by a cabal of lost boys and girls who came and went in the night. I changed the lock.

I took over the excommunicated Linda Lee’s spaces and, after posting a sign that read NO ROOMS AVAILABLE, I started the informal application process for artists in need. I decided there was space for three to live and work in the building besides Harry, and since the Barometer and I were already there, we had room for one more resident. We settled on Eve, a flamboyant character born and raised in Idaho, twenty-five years old and a seamstress of force. She moved in with her Singer and sewed up a circus of artworks that Harry and I both thought were adorable. Eve didn’t stay long. Ulysses, a sculptor in the minimalist tradition, followed, and then came Delia, who worked exclusively in old-shoe installations (my favorite). I created the minimal rules and regulations — no littering on-site; excessive noise after eleven p.m. strictly forbidden; love objects welcome but absolutely no sexual business transacted on site (not a problem anymore, but as a prohibition it gave us some chuckles); presence required once every two months to show and discuss finished work or work in progress. We hired a weekly cleaning team to roar through the two floors of the building, divvied up some domestic jobs, and the lodge was civilized.

But you want to know how it happened, the story between Harry and me. Well, it didn’t happen fast. It crawled up on us. We rented movies on Sunday afternoons, mostly oldies Harry had never seen: Busby Berkeley extravaganzas for their kaleidoscope visuals—Footlight Parade, Gold Diggers, Forty-second Street; some Rogers and Astaire; and the old films for Negro audiences only: Cabin in the Sky and Look-Out Sister, and Harlem Is Heaven with the Jangler — Bojangles, “Everything’s Copacetic,” the “Dark Cloud of Joy,” born Luther-in-Richmond-Virginia-Robinson, who danced up on his toes, precise rhythms, perfect tones — and Stormy Weather with Robinson again, some faux version of his life with Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Lena Horne, and the oh-my-god-I-can’t-believe-how-well-they-can-dance Nicholas Brothers. I started tap lessons at four and could impress Harry with some shuffle-ball changes and skating moves, but I never had the real stuff. Lester does a little soft shoe in my show, and it always goes over pretty well. Harry called the Sunday movie our “cozy time,” and she liked to put on what she called “soft clothes” or “nearly pajamas” for the occasion and make popcorn. Then we’d sprawl and laze in front of the TV. We were not always alone. Other members of the lodge joined us from time to time. Bruno, Eve, or the Barometer, who wandered in and out or brought his sketchpad to the sofa and drew.

Exactly when our project was hatched I can’t remember, but one Saturday I visited Harry’s studio and noticed she had painted SUFFOCATION in huge letters on the wall. “I’m thinking about it,” she said, “as a theme.” Then she changed the subject, or so I thought at the time. I now believe it was the same subject, not a transition, because it was a story about her father. She told me about her first show in New York, when she was in her early thirties. Her parents came to the opening. Her mother was sweet and proud and full of congratulations. Her father was silent, but then right before he left, he said to her, “It doesn’t resemble much else that’s out there, does it?”

I asked her what he had meant. She said she didn’t really know. I asked her how she answered back, and she said, “I didn’t say anything.”

He shut her up.

The man wasn’t some unsophisticated boob; he knew art. He had a hankering for Frank Stella, she told me. I said to Harry: “That’s pretty cold, don’t you think? I mean, it’s a cold thing to say to your own daughter.”

“That’s what Doctor F. says.”

I told her a medical degree wasn’t needed to see cold as cold.

Harry looked as if she might cry.

I pretended to be sorry, but I wasn’t.

Harry told me lots of stories about the man, and my opinion on the matter is that her dad, when he was among the living, had a problem with both who Harry was and with what she did. Being and Doing — the big ones. Harry’s work was warm: I don’t mean electrically heated — I mean it was passionate and sexed-up and scary. Her father was a tight-ass who liked neat, closed systems: the world in a jar. What was he going to make of her stuff? He wouldn’t have liked it whoever had done it. Still, I didn’t blame Harry for trying. Hadn’t I spent my whole goddamned life making up stories about my own heroic father, loving and hating him? And when Daryl came along courting Mama with his big smiles and his shiny shoes, hadn’t I wished he would just vanish or drop dead on the spot?

We started our collaboration because Harry wanted a phallic front. I told her she should think twice about taking on a swishy black man, but Harry was undeterred by my status as a member of not one but two minorities. She wanted scenes of suffocation, she said, metaphorical ones, not pillows over a face, but a theater of rooms the spectator had to enter, and she wanted me to help her build it. Hadn’t I lived my life mostly as a nancy boy? Hadn’t I changed my name in 1995 to celebrate my second self? Hadn’t I known what it felt like to be smothered before that, Pentecostal tongues or no tongues? Didn’t we live in a country that is perverted by racism? Wasn’t I a black man, even though I wasn’t much darker than Harry? People still called me “black,” didn’t they? What did skin tone have to do with it? Her mother was Jewish, so she was Jewish. She knew something about anti-Semitism. The Protestant set of her grandparents had been sick with that particular strain of flu. And what about sexism? How many years had women had the vote? Not even a hundred years! Didn’t I play a man and a woman, a white man and a black woman in one body? (Harry swooned for Hester and Lester, especially Hester, the whinnying, haranguing spouse of the not-nearly-so-gabby Lester.) Didn’t we understand each other? Weren’t we alike in many ways? (Harry’s identification with me might sound outrageous to some people, but it was sincere.) She didn’t truck much with conventional ways of dividing up the world — black/white, male/female, gay/straight, abnormal/normal — none of these boundaries convinced her. These were impositions, defining categories that failed to recognize the muddle that is us, us human beings. “Reductionism!” She used to shout this every now and then. Her son took after her. Neither of them liked what they saw out there in the big world — received ideas were for peons and huckleberries — and yet, there was tension between them—bristling is the word. Maisie was the peacemaker, the sweetie pie waving a white flag.

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.

Rune had it. Whatever it is, it’s something you can feel in a room, an animal verve, a slink with some sex in it, but it wasn’t personal sex. He was not seducing anyone. He was seducing everyone, and there’s a big difference. I am a student of personal presentation, and it is wildly important to appear careless if not indifferent to the opinions of other people. Even a hint of desperation is ugly, and we must avoid it at all costs. Misery sucks up energy in the person who feels it and in all those who are forced to look at it, and then we’re all stuck in the mud. Desire functions best when it’s directed at a beautiful blank — the boys and girls into whom we toss all our pathetic hopes for happiness. In many ways, Rune was a perfect third candidate for Harry. He arrived with ready-made aura, that mysterious quality that infects our eyes so we can’t tell what we’re looking at anymore. Is the emperor naked or am I a fool? Some hated Rune’s work and others loved it, but no one disputed his power to sway. I don’t know how Harry talked him into becoming a front. He had all the markers of success, a palace-size apartment on Greenwich Street, a house in the Hamptons, and legions of women running marathons after him. Maybe he was bored. Maybe something happened to him after September 11 that made him want what Harry had — her passion, her seriousness, her capacity for joy. I don’t know.

I have a clear memory of Harry and Rune, heads together in the gallery, talking. They were about the same height. I studied him from behind — short blond hair, big shoulders and upper back, narrow hips and a small, hard, slightly flat posterior, long legs in jeans, black boots with heels. And when I moved around to see his face, I noticed he had some wrinkles around his eyes, not so young anymore, but handsome, photogenic. He had a beautiful young woman with him. The two of them looked more like movie stars than movie stars look when you actually see them. She had that slick shine to her that comes from knowing everybody’s looking at you all the time, the pose held for a camera that isn’t there.

What had they talked about? In the cab on the way back to the lodge, Harry said their big subject had been Bill Wechsler. Harry loved Wechsler’s work. She counted him as an influence, although he was born after her. He had died suddenly a few months earlier. I remember she held my hand in the taxi and kissed it several times in a fit of sudden affection, saying, “Dear, dear Phinny.” Then, after we got home, we lounged about with a cognac, getting tipsy. Harry confided she found Rune’s crosses boring, but she liked some of his earlier works, the plastic-surgery screens, which were genuinely creepy. Maybe she’d buy one — a good investment. If it didn’t hold up, she could always turn around and sell it to some hungry collector eager for the name.

After bussing me in the taxi, Harry turned prickly, irritable, and sour. She had drunk too much, and I could feel the self-pity mounting as she rolled off the names of women artists suppressed, dismissed, or forgotten. She jumped up from the sofa and stomped back and forth across the room. Artemisia Gentileschi, treated with contempt by posterity, her best work attributed to her father. Judith Leyster, admired in her day, then erased. Her work handed over to Frans Hals. Camille Claudel’s reputation swallowed whole by Rodin’s. Dora Maar’s big mistake: She screwed Picasso, a fact that had obliterated her brilliant Surrealist photographs. Fathers, teachers, and lovers suffocate women’s reputations. These are three I remember. Harry had an endless supply. “With women,” Harry said, “it’s always personal, love and muck, whom they fuck.” And a favorite theme of Harry’s, women treated like children by paternal critics, who refer to them by their first names: Artemisia, Judith, Camille, Dora.

I crossed my legs, looked askance at Harry, and began to whistle. It was not the first time I had taken this approach. “I am not the enemy,” I said. “Remember me, Mr. Feminist Phineas Q., your friend and ally, black gay man or gay black man with slave ancestors, hence original name, Whittier? You may recall that black people were both feminized and infantilized by racism, dark bodies and dark continents, honey child. Seventy-year-old men were called boys by twenty-year-old white ladies.”

Harry sat down. Whistling, along with a few caustic verbal darts, usually brought her up short. She gave me that oh-Phinny-I’ve-gotten-carried-away-and-am-embarrassed-but-still-fiercely-attached-to-my-opinion look. Much later, I looked back at the evening and saw further ironies. If Harry knew that art history had steadily sunk the reputations of women artists by assigning their work to the dad, the husband, or the mentor, then she should have known that borrowing a big name like Rune might sting her in the end. And yet, what Harry took for granted was that she moved as a collector in circles where money and celebrity mingled, white circles with the rare black and brown face. I know because I had been that face.

Rune was smart, and he was gifted, but I doubt anyone can actually separate talent from reputation when it comes down to it. Celebrity works its own miracle, and after a while it lights up the art. I am curious about the man’s death, but I suspect he was one of those people who could never feel enough, and as time went on he had to push himself to further extremes to get any kind of a rush from life. I don’t really know what happened between him and Harry. I know she cared about him. I know he fascinated her. But I had fallen for Marcelo and moved away by the time it went wrong. All the gossip, all the lying and posturing billowing up like smoke around the whole story, have made me bilious. There was plenty of pain to go around.

A small plastic-surgery work popped up at the lodge a couple of months later. Most of “the collection” Felix Lord had accumulated was in storage, but she had Rune’s screen mounted on the wall upstairs, and we could all watch the artist’s little film: The New Me. It began with multiple versions of “before and after” ads, including the old drawings of a scrawny wimp on the beach transformed into a muscleman. We saw the fat, sagging, lumpy, and drooping metamorphosed into the slender, tight, smooth, and lifted. Rune, however, included “during” as well — films from facial surgery with blood-soaked gauze, knives slicing cheeks, skin flayed open, as well as flashes from an instructional video in which a row of practicing physicians bent over heads that had been severed from cadavers. The movie had a music video feel to it but played in silence, with fast cuts, clever edits that juxtaposed gore and loveliness. After about five minutes, the transformations became fantastical, a visual science fiction journey with animated bits of molded, airbrushed, robotic body-beautifuls. Rune himself was all over it in brief stills, close-ups, and long shots, some flattering, some not.

I liked it.

When Ethan saw it, he told to his mother that the work was a side effect of celebrity culture. He called it “life in the third person,” a phrase I liked. He said that’s what people want, to lose their insides and become pure surfaces. He told Harry she had wasted her money. She could have written out a check for the homeless. (We could always give it to the homeless or the environment or disease research.) Harry defended Rune. Ethan called it a pandering piece of shit for the stupid class. He didn’t raise his voice, but he argued steadily. He reminded me of my hero Levolor, that pious adolescent crusader, bumping along on his high horse. Ethan’s brand of Puritanism had a left-wing coloring, but that didn’t soften it any. Harry muttered that it was all right for the two of them to disagree, but her voice had turned husky. She reached out for him with her long fingers, but hesitated when they neared his shoulders. He stepped backward and blurted out, “Felix would have hated it.”

Harry flinched. Then she closed her eyes, inhaled loudly through her nose, and her mouth stretched flat and tight in preparation for tears, which did not come. She nodded as she tried to hold her face still. She put her fingers to her mouth and just kept nodding. I wanted to vanish in a puff of purple smoke. Ethan had a paralyzed look about him. Say something, I thought, come on, say something. He was speechless, but he flushed to his ears, and his eyes had lost their focus. Soon after, Ethan left, and Harry sequestered herself in the studio. The scene had made me sad, and I knew I would be on my way before too long. The lodge was transitional, a temporary hideout, one of the strange turns in a strange life.

There is one other story I have to tell. There are times when I’ve thought to myself, Phinny, you must have dreamed it, but I didn’t. One night, I came home from the club. It was about five in the morning, maybe a little later. The night was cold, and before I went inside, I stood by the water and looked up at a skinny little moon with some thin clouds over it. When I walked into the hallway, I immediately knew something was wrong. I heard a retching sound, a cry, then loud cracks and thuds. The acoustics were strange in that building and tracing noises wasn’t easy. I checked on the Barometer, but he was in his sleeping bag. Burglars are quiet, I thought. I heard gasps, more choking sounds. They’re coming from Harry’s studio, I thought. I rushed to the door, opened it, and at the far end of the room, about twenty-five yards away, I saw Harry kneeling on the floor. She had a big kitchen cleaver in her fist and was ripping open one of her metamorphs. I couldn’t tell which one. The huge space was dark except for a single light that shone down on her. She didn’t hear me, because she groaned each time she thrust the knife into the padded body. There were also broken fragments of wood around her, and I guessed she had torn apart one of her little rooms or boxes.

I closed the door as quietly as I could and tiptoed to my room. I’m sure there are scads of artists over the centuries who have kicked, beaten, and mangled their own works in despair and frustration — it was no crime. Looking at her through the door frightened me, though. I told myself I was a queasy oaf — oh-so-sensitive Phinny. The figure wasn’t a person. It was no more than a stuffed doll. It felt no pain. That was all true. The police were not going to come around and make an arrest for metamorph murder. Later, I realized that, despite all that, what scared me had been real. Harry’s rage had been real.