The Blazing World

Bruno Kleinfeld (written statement)

Did we settle down the way two fogies ought to settle down in their late-middle-to-old-age, their copious butts in a couple of La-Z-Boy chairs, their feet propped on ottomans, muttering, Did you take out the garbage, dear? Did you remember the milk? No, we did not. Old Man Time screwed us over. He ripped my lady away before we could become the doddering old farts we deserved to be together, sans teeth, squinting through our cataracts, reaching out for the old, soft flesh in the middle of the night. But Bruno, you wax Romantic. Harry was not a settler, and who knows if she ever would have settled in, settled down with her bear. She had been there, done that, in the time before Bruno. The husband — what a strange word — the husband kept coming back, like smoke in the room, stinking up the air between us. Felix Lord and his dough and his art and his sex life still burned like a forgotten cigarette in one of those goddamned crystal ashtrays Harry kept around from her former life on the uppity Upper East Side. God, I hated that effete ghoul who refused to rest, the way decent, normal dead people do. He haunted her. I kid you not. My verbs are not casual. I am a poet, failed, maybe, but a blathering bard, nevertheless, telling tales of those halcyon days of Harry not too long ago and not too far away. I am Bruno Kleinfeld declaiming for all to hear that Felix Lord came to her in dreams, half dead and half alive, a vampire with his fangs fastened in her neck, and my beloved would wake up sweaty and panicked, her eyes roaming the room for him, not because she wanted him back, but because she wanted to make sure he was dead and gone.

Maisie and Ethan, I beg your pardons, but Daddy-o took Mommy for granted. Did he fight for her? No, he did not. Where did it come from — Harry’s pseudonymous mania — except from him? How many women artists did Felix Lord show? Three? And over how many years? Harry watched, and Harry learned. She learned that her very own art-hustle mastermind wasn’t going to lift a finger for her work and that only art’s big boys get satisfaction. “He couldn’t help me, don’t you see?” Harry used to wail. “Sure he could” was my roared retort. After a while, the injustice of it all, the sick, sad misery of being ignored, cracked her heart in two and demented her with anger. I wanted her to fight on, but she decided to walk through the back door and send someone else around the front.

She was a strong woman, my Harry, but not an easy woman. The poem, the project of projects, the anthill that became a mountain, the thing I was eternally climbing and never getting over, my darling work of great verse, the one of Whitmanian proportions, my own American Commedia, that Harry had hugged close during the first year of our passion as my noble quest, became a bugbear once she understood that it wasn’t going anywhere. The poem became a nasty goblin that turned the flesh-and-blood darling of my life into a shrew, a carping, screeching, nagging witch who threw flaming daggers at me and the poem. “It’s so neurotic! You’ve rewritten it five hundred times. What is the matter with you? You’re so afraid. Do you think your cock will shrivel up if you’re not Dante, for Christ’s sake?”

No, it wasn’t easy loving Harry and the poem. I would creep off after a showdown about the interminable project and return to the hole across the street to lick my wounds on the scarred linoleum, and then crawl back, like the dog I was, to her big bed and her muscular arms that held me harder than any woman I’ve ever known. I couldn’t say it then, but the old girl was right about the poem. It had taken me into a dark wood all right, and it wasn’t ever going to get me to the Paradiso, but to give it up meant to give up me, myself, and I, as the ten-year-old Bruno Kleinfeld used to say as he admired his mug in the mirror after a game, reliving a big one he had blasted over the fence.

I couldn’t tell Harry, feminist warrior, that it was worse for a man, worse for a man to fail, to lose the strut in his walk as he feels the power sucked from his guts, the manly fire that had kept him going uphill. Millennia had piled up expectations, stone by stone, brick by brick, word by word, until the stones, bricks, and words weigh so much that the hopeful antihero can’t get out from under them — can’t see his way into a single line he might call his own, and he writhes under the tonnage, begging for mercy.

Despite her fears about the outside, Harry was free inside. She believed in her steam and fury, and she pushed her art out of her like wet, bloody newborns. When I die, they’ll see, she used to crow. The last joke will be mine. When I told her she reminded me of a de Kooning woman, one of those scary mammas with the leering mouths, she grinned with pleasure and rubbed her palms together. She hid The Heathcliff from me until she had finished it. The figure had a huge head thrust back, an open mouth, and a half-crushed birdcage between its gigantic hands. In the cage were bits of ripped lace, a book of Shelley’s poems, pieces of written-over paper, and a torn white stocking that drooped like a tongue between the bars. At first, the thing felt like a kick in the stomach, all force, but from up close, the person, if it was a person, had cuts and slices in its mottled bronze body and hanging breasts.

“Heathcliff was a man, Harry. This is a woman.”

Harry’s eyes ignited as she said, “He is more myself than I am.”

Catherine says it. The first and wildest Catherine in the great, meaty, diabolical novel that is Wuthering Heights. Harry’s brain ran hot and fast. I knew the book and its branching sensuous prose, an old favorite of mine, a literary brick, to be sure. But Harry gobbled down other treatises and tracts and obscure works I’d never heard of. She read and read, on top of making her art, and there were days when I said, “Harry, I don’t know what the hell you’re jawing on about now.” The woman was chin-deep in the neuroscience of perception, and for some reason, those unreadable papers with their abstracts and discussions justified her second life as a scam artist. Eldridge egged her on, too, but he wasn’t responsible for the ruse. Even though I fought The Suffocation Rooms and the idea of Harry as a gay guy (which she found hilarious and I found silly), I can now see the damage didn’t last. Eldridge set the record straight. I never met that namby-pamby kid Tish, but it seems to me he wasn’t worth the anagram shit. Ran off to Tibet. No, it was Rune in league with Lord’s phantom that made the mess. I blame the two of them. The story isn’t simple and it isn’t straight, but I’d like to offer up my memories, some foggy, some clear.

Once Harry and I were thick, tight, and coupled up (to the degree that was possible with a dyed-in-the-wool bluestocking), I saw more and more of the vulnerable girl in her. The nightmares were bad, but she also got the sobs or rages at night, especially after she had seen her shrink. “Why do you go in for that crap?” I asked her. “He just shakes you up. What good does it do?” But when I wheedled her for the dope on a “session,” she’d just shake her head and smile, tears still rolling. “You’re jealous of the doctor. That’s nice, Bruno. That’s really nice.” I wasn’t jealous. I didn’t like to see her upset, but she knew I didn’t have much use for psychoanalysis either. My pal Jerry Weiner got stuck for thirty years with some doctor on Central Park West, and as far as I could tell, Jerry stayed the same cheap, ornery bastard he’d always been. I liked Rachel, but then, Rachel would have brightened up the morgue if she had chosen to work as a coroner. That was just Rachel.

When Rune first popped up into Harry’s life is a mystery to me, but one May afternoon in 2001—I know because it was the spring before the towers fell, and the day was warm and sprouting, and I was close to the end of my semester at LIU — I found the two of them on Harry’s sofa, tittering like a couple of teenage girls, drinking chardonnay, eating peanuts. Harry did the introductions, and Rune, bleached teeth bright as an egg, said, “Oh, the poet.”

I didn’t like the way he said it. Oh, the poet. Didn’t like the Oh, didn’t like the way he trailed off on poet, didn’t like his whitened teeth or his belt buckle or the stupid tight shirt he was wearing or his scuffed boots or the way he had laid his arm over the back of the sofa or the way he talked about his “films.” Didn’t like the man from the start. When he finally waltzed his puny ass out the door, I felt relieved.

I remember Harry accused me of “glowering.” I said I didn’t glower, but that she was “all aflutter,” and it didn’t suit her, a mature woman mincing and giggling like a teenybopper. There was some peckish back-and-forth between us about semantics—glower, flutter, and mince—and then she looked down on me from the imperious heights of Harrydom, as cold and grand as she could be, and announced that she did not need my approval. She would not accommodate my whims. She had moved out of the way once too often, thank you very much, tiptoed around in her old life like a slavey waiting for crumbs to fall. (This self-portrait by Our Lady of the Coats struck me as nothing short of a howler.) I told her Rune looked like a fucking gigolo. Still hoity-toity, enunciating in complete, well-formed paragraphs, the Queen continued — he was a reigning king of the art market, surely I knew, and he just loved her work. She had given him the tour, the tour she gave only to friends, highly select friends who knew she didn’t show, knew she had finished with dealers and galleries and “all that.” I said maybe he loved her money, was sniffing around for a sale, and the fireworks went off, whistle, crack, boom. Cash and assets. Felix Lord’s cologne stinking aboveground.

After the fire-breathing sparks had been snuffed out between us, I wondered aloud if he didn’t strike her as a bit slick and shiny. Mr. Surface Rune had mastered the art walk and the art talk, hadn’t he? Yes, he had, she admitted, but Harry waved her arms. He had loads of money, and ideas: Mr. Memory, Mr. Artificial Intelligence, Mr. Computer. My Harry’s face was all sunny and warm with Rune’s lofty thoughts. Can robots have consciousness? Is thinking information processing? They had debated the Turing machine, and the Turing test. “He’s dead wrong, Bruno, but it’s fun to argue, don’t you see?” And the art? I looked him up. I thought he looked like a goddamned male model with his rippling abdomen, popping biceps, films of him scratching his ass, picking his nose. Who is he kidding? I said to Harry, and she said, “But he is kidding, Bruno.”

Who started the idea that every life should be recorded for posterity? Was it that lunatic Rousseau? Look, I’m a liar, a cheat, a masochist. Look, I’m chucking my children into an orphanage! The man sliced himself open for all to see. I have a weakness for Jean-Jacques, it is true, the hero of me-me-me. By the end of his life, Allen Ginsberg had a camera crew with him everywhere he went. Self as myth, self as movie, he droned on to the camera, but at least he wrote a couple of good poems. My hero Walt was pretty big on self-promotion, too. He plastered Emerson’s words on Leaves of Grass, words he stole from a private letter. Whitman was a nobody, and Emerson an eminence grise. Emerson’s words: “I salute you at the beginning of a great career.” The book received two anonymous reviews written by young Walt himself: “An American bard at last!” Maybe we should be glad he had no Internet access. I can see it now: Be part of it: Whitmania! And why not me? The Bruno Kleinfeld website: unknown antihero pounding the keys of his Olivetti typewriter for whom?

Who was Rune, né Rune Larsen? The hell if I know. What did she see in him? One night in bed, lying flat and staring up at the ceiling, I blurted out a question. Did she have a hankering for younger bones? Harry played obtuse. “What? What are you talking about?” “Him,” I said to her, “Him, the art star.” Her blast of hilarity almost sent me flying across the room. She loved him for his gift, his talent for manipulation, his persona. He had accomplished his glory with bluster and swagger and drive. This fascinated her. His puffed-up ego had contagious properties, and there was something more to him as well. Maybe Harry had him pegged from the start. Maybe when she was giggling on the sofa with that psychopath, they were already conspirators. She hid the plot from me because she knew I wouldn’t approve. I didn’t track her comings and goings. Harry was tough. No more Mrs. Nice Guy. No more pandering to a Husband or any Man. She was free now, and the Big Bear wasn’t going to interfere. I got the message. The days belonged to her. The evenings were ours — drinks at Sunny’s, dinner at her place, a DVD — but no settling. The loony residents came and went. The Barometer with his weather signs, “Humid Harassments Amassing from Infernal Circulars,” Eve with her bizarre outfits, Eldridge trying out new schticks for his show.

I’m not sure Harry really liked the thing she bought by Rune — the video screen with faces cut to bits and put back together again, a movie mishmash of glamour and gore. It was a multiple — which meant “not that expensive.” One afternoon, I parked myself in front of the screen and gave it a yeoman’s try. “Let me be fair,” I said, “and not loaded with prejudice just because the artist is an asshole. T. S. Eliot was no paragon, was he? Are these bloody mugs and sliced cheeks any good? Am I interested? Do I care?” To be honest, the darned thing stumped me. I told Harry it made me feel lonely, and she laughed, but then she said it made her lonely, too. “It’s not about communion,” she said. I didn’t know at the time that Rune was ripe to be her last stand. In her head, he was vehicle numero uno. If she could harness his star power, she could prove how the machinery worked, how ideas of greatness make greatness, and once she had triumphed, the great unmasking would take place! Harriet Burden, her own woman.

And so we two, Harry and Bruno, duked it out and then made it up in our domains in Red Hook, one grand, one puny, but each domicile reliable in its own way. Around us the city buzzed and screeched, and the foghorns blew, and the clouds moved overhead. It rained and it thundered and then it brightened, and the seasons changed. But every day the sun rose, and the sun set, and when we stepped outside, the street was there, and Harry’s truck was there, and the Manhattan skyline was there. And then New York City was slammed from the outside. From blue sky to smoking sky in minutes — we heard the second plane, low and loud, and we saw it hit. We saw it again on television. I tried to understand it, but I couldn’t. I knew and I didn’t know. Once we had found out that Maisie had retrieved Aven from kindergarten at the Little Red School House on Sixth Avenue in the West Village, that Oscar had not had to travel to Brooklyn that day, that Ethan was in his apartment in Williamsburg, that my daughter Cleo, the only Kleinfeld offspring who lived in New York, was indeed in her office in the Brill Building in Midtown, that Phinny and Ulysses and the Barometer had not yet budged for the day, we watched through the window as the winds carried the diseased dust and debris over Red Hook. We shut the windows against the unspeakable stench, and spent much of the early afternoon tending to the Barometer. The man’s cosmological delusions bumped and lurched this way and that in ordinary weather. The smoke, the explosions, the falling papers, pulverized plastic, and flesh tipped him into a state of nonstop gibberish and stiff, machine-like gestures. With his wild hair and beard, his dirty Grateful Dead T-shirt, and his torn khaki pants that hung about his bony, bowed legs, he expounded mechanically about the “groaning sublimity of transportable tempers and their combustible storm-patriots romping in divine intercourse with God’s archangels” (excerpt from P.Q.E.’s tape. The Barometer’s language is impossible to remember). I prayed. I prayed he’d shut up. The carnage meant nothing to the Raver. Mass murder didn’t touch him. He was lost in his own power fantasies of control, which the day had exploded or confirmed (I’m not sure which). Ulysses produced a Xanax, which we eventually managed to cajole him into taking. We put the nut job to sleep.

Ladder 101. All seven firefighters who answered the call died.

Days later, I remember Harry at the window. She made a low noise that came from her chest, not her mouth. Then she said, “Human beings are the only animals who kill for ideas.”

When I think back, I realize no one I knew lusted for vengeance. For a period of weeks, it seemed to me that nearly every New Yorker who was still alive became a saint. We spoke to strangers on the subway and asked them, “Are you okay?” meaning “Did you lose anyone?” We donated shovels, clothes, flashlights. We lined up to give blood, even though that blood turned out to be useless. You had either died or you had survived. Rune grabbed a camera and filmed guerrilla-style. The area was cordoned off, but he must have wormed in past the cops. I know he called Harry. She worried aloud about his lust for photos. Did the mentally sick get sicker after September 11? There must be some goddamned report on it out there somewhere.

Most New Yorkers comported themselves like angels, but the pundits, commentators, and journalists yapped their pieties, waved their clichés, and brandished their platitudes. And in the years that followed, Bush and his cronies erected one big lie after another over the incinerated corpses in lower Manhattan. Soaring collective goodness can’t last. We regressed to our sniping, smart-mouthed, but also intermittently kind and helpful selves and, because one day after another came and went without a subway explosion, bridge collapse, or skyscraper meltdown, we were lulled back to what Warren G. Harding called “normalcy,” code for just-the-regular-day-to-day-crap-life-offers, thank you very much: work doldrums, adulterous affairs, family squabbles, all manner of neuroses, asthma, stomach ulcers, rheumatisms, and acid reflux.

When Harry told me not long after the attacks that Rune had agreed to take a turn as the last actor in her grand tripartite scheme, I burst out with a big why-the-hell-would-he-want-to-do-that? Harry’s reasoning was bollixed up by her wishes, but it had various strands. The subterfuge was right up Rune’s alley, a ploy that wowed him because, if it all went as planned, he could become the biggest art world kidder of them all. He would expose the critics (some of whom he hoped to draw and quarter) as clowns. This was the man’s vulnerability, Harry claimed. There were those who called him a con artist, a panderer. Plus the market scared him. Up one day, down the next. He didn’t want to go the way of Sandro Chia, dumped on the market by Saatchi, never to recover. Rune lived like a pasha, indulged himself; he needed upkeep. He would turn the tables on his naysayers. When they mocked his latest, he could produce Harry to confound them. But she also claimed that she had wrenched the great Rune’s thoughts, remade his inner world, and that the horrific event downtown had exploded his plotline. It didn’t work out like that. In the end, the simpleton Bruno knew more than the Grande Dame of irony.

What does a woman want? What did Harry want? She did not want to be Rune. She did not want to sell her work for millions of dollars. She knew the art world was mostly a stink hole of vain poseurs who bought names to launder their money. “I want to be understood,” she would wail at me. Hers was a heady game, a philosophical fairy tale. Oh, Harry had explanations, justifications, arguments. But I ask you, in what world was this understanding going to take place? In Harry’s magic kingdom, where the citizens lounged about reading philosophy and science and arguing about perception? It’s a crude world, old girl, I used to tell her. “Look at what’s happened to poetry! It’s become quaint, cute, and ‘accessible.’ ” Harry wanted her pseudonymous tale to be read by illiterates. Obsession is what she had, and obsession is a machine that grinds and clanks and hisses hour after hour, day after day, month after month, year after year. She hated my poem. I hated her fairy tale. She built Rune a magnum opus, a maze of her own private dance of grief, and he stole it. When she told me he wasn’t going to go through with her plan, she was flat on her back in her studio ogling a big, fat lady with forceps and a cowbell she had hung from the ceiling. Edgar and two other assistants, Ursula and Carlos, had gone home. It was about six in the evening. She had called me a few minutes before. “Come over, Brune. Something’s happened.” Her voice, hurt and faltering. She didn’t look at me once while the story rolled out of her, word by word, slowly, deliberately. Only her mouth moved. The rest of Harry had turned into a rock.

Rune had shown her a video of himself with Felix Lord. It was nothing, she kept saying, nothing at all, just the two of them sitting on a sofa in a nondescript room she had never seen before, not saying a word to each other, thirty, forty seconds of silence and one smile exchanged between them. The dead husband had roared back on film. “Why didn’t you tell me you knew Felix?” Harry had asked him. And he had said, “Does it matter?”

“Does it matter, Bruno?”

You bet it does, I said. It’s sneaky as hell. I told her I’d like to take my bat and smash his brains out.

And Harry said, “This is not a cartoon, Bruno.”

So much is gone now, of our conversations, I mean. The nights we lay and burbled into the wee hours, we two, my big, warm Harry and me, my pet, my heartsease, all lost, not a word left, but This is not a cartoon, Bruno is stamped into the furrows of my brain forever. I have perfect recall for this exchange. I went mum then, mute as a man who’d lost his larynx. She made me feel like some stupid jerk in a gorilla suit, blindly swinging because he can’t see out the eyeholes.

When I asked Harry what it meant, she said she didn’t know. Rune wouldn’t say. “He said that it’s just part of the game.”

I asked, “What game? What game?” I pressed her. I pressed her hard. “Blackmail?”

Harry stared at the ceiling and shook her head. She said she thought Rune was playing mind games with her and that the bastard would do anything to win. She said he wanted to worm an idea into her brain, that he had been Lord’s lover, maybe, or that he had known all about her from Felix before they met, something, anything. Once there is a secret, Harry said, you can fill up the hole with suspicion. When he was alive, Felix had secrets. Harry set her jaw and her eyes narrowed. She didn’t look at me. “He’s going to say Beneath is his. But it’s too late,” she said. “He won’t get away with it.”

Lord’s grave was never quiet. I wanted to shake Harry, force her to end it. Now was her chance to stop the merry-go-round, to jump off. I would help her. Bruno, her hero and protector, would swoop in to save her from herself. “Let’s go away,” I said. “Let’s leave.”

Harry shook her head.

I told her I loved her. I love you to high heaven, I said. I love you. Do you hear me?

She heard me. “I love you, too,” she said. She was not thinking of me.

Bruno, high on his noble sentiments, Mr. Rescue: All I needed was a phone booth where I could change into the suit. There aren’t phone booths anymore, old man.

I remember the sun made rectangles of light on the wood floor. I remember Harry’s sad face, and I remember the words that popped up to be quoted on that palimpsest in my mind. They came from the book of Ruth, King James version, the words of a woman who trailed after another woman and refused to turn back.

Whither thou goest, I will go, I said to Harry. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried.

Harry smiled a wobbly smile. “That’s nice, Bruno,” she said.

It felt like a kick to the gut.