The Blazing World

Maisie Lord (edited transcript)

My mother had to tell me and Ethan that Phinny was her front, because she knew the moment we saw The Suffocation Rooms we’d know she was responsible for them. Those lumpy figures, the heat in the rooms: No one but Mother made art like that. She just blurted it out: “Maisie, Phinny’s showing my work for me.” When I gaped at her and asked her if she had gone completely batty, she got that wrinkled, knowing look on her face, which always let me know a big explanation was coming, and she launched into a story about James Tiptree, the science fiction writer. According to Mother, for at least ten years no one actually saw Tiptree in the flesh, not even his editor. His secret identity caused a lot of speculation, and there were some people who thought that hiding behind the pseudonym there might be a woman, not a man. Robert Silverberg, another science fiction writer, wrote an introduction for a book of stories by Tiptree. He weighed in on the sex question and argued that just as no man could have written the novels of Jane Austen, no woman could have produced the stories of Ernest Hemingway or James Tiptree. Mother loved this part of the Tiptree drama because Silverberg’s faith in the writer’s unimpeachable masculinity turned out to be misplaced. When the actual person stepped out from behind the pen name, the macho Tiptree turned out to be Alice Bradley Sheldon.

But Mother stressed that nothing was simple. After she had invented Tiptree and before she unveiled herself as Alice Sheldon, the writer took on another persona, a female one she named Raccoona Sheldon, whose work was rejected by a number of publishers and deemed inferior to Tiptree’s. The writer, who had been praised as a man who could write feminist science fiction, now had a female mask, too. My mother said the bizarre name Raccoona had surely been inspired, at least on a subliminal level, by the masks raccoons don’t wear but simply have — the ones given them by nature. That’s the title of my third film, the one I’m working on now about my mother: The Natural Mask. The revelation that James Tiptree and Raccoona Sheldon were two sides of the same person didn’t make life simpler for Alice Sheldon. Although the women who had been friends with Tiptree by letter, including Ursula Le Guin, greeted the newly revealed Alice Sheldon warmly, a number of the men who had been writing to her vanished abruptly from her life.

Mother told me the whole story with shining eyes. We were sitting across from each other at her kitchen table, and she leaned toward me, lifting her index finger every now and then to make her points. What interested her was not simply substituting a man’s name for a woman’s. That was boring. No, she pointed out that Le Guin had suspected all along that Raccoona and Tiptree were two authors that came from the same source, but in a letter to Alice she wrote that she preferred Tiptree to Raccoona: “Raccoona, I think, has less control, thus less wit and power.”

Le Guin, Mother said, had understood something deep. “When you take on a male persona, something happens.”

When I asked her what that was, she sat back in her chair, waved her arm, and smiled. “You get to be the father.”

As her daughter, I didn’t like hearing my mother talk about being the father. I felt a visceral jolt under my ribs, but I started giggling and said something like “Oh, Mother, come on, you don’t really mean that.” But Mother did mean it. She told me that in 1987 Tiptree shot her husband and then killed herself. Mother said Sheldon couldn’t live without her man — not her husband, obviously, but the man inside her — and she believed that’s why she exploded into violence.

I retell the Tiptree story in my film. Alice, who was known as Alli to her friends, once said: “My biography is ambisexual.” Harriet Burden, known as Harry to her friends, could have said the same thing. It did not end there. My mother knew that telling me about her pseudonyms upset me because her father and my father were somehow mixed up in it. I suppose we all like to have people and things in their place, neatly outlined in black, but the world just isn’t like that.

We talked about Aven for a while and the death of Radish, who drowned in a glass of orange juice. My daughter had been so cavalier about the death of her noisy, difficult, but also jovial companion who lived in her throat that it had worried me. Mother laughed and said imaginary friends didn’t need funerals. They returned to “from whence they came,” and we both laughed.

And then we covered the Ethan territory. Mother and I always did. He was our shared obsession, the son and brother we couldn’t quite figure out so we always had to talk about him. He had just published his first short story in a literary magazine, and Mother was proud. “The Umbrella” is a curious tale about a man who forms an erotic attachment to his striped umbrella. Whenever it rains, he shudders with excitement at the prospect of opening the umbrella, and he has to work hard to resist pressing the little spring on sunny days, although he spends a lot of time admiring its beauty as it leans casually to one side in its stand. Like my brother, the story’s hero has rules for how to behave. Out in the street on rainy days under his umbrella, he doesn’t want anyone to see that he’s actually quivering with joy. To everyone he passes or meets, the umbrella should be only a thing — a tool for keeping off the rain. And then one day, after he has checked it with his coat at a restaurant and had his meal, the woman who hangs the outerwear retrieves the right coat but the wrong umbrella. A search ensues, but the striped umbrella is not found, and Ethan’s nameless hero is devastated, although he keeps up a false front for the obsequious manager, who apologizes profusely for the error. He walks into the street with the wrong umbrella, which he discards in a bin, and proceeds home in a deluge, getting wetter and wetter and colder and colder. The last sentence, which uses the feminine pronoun for the first time, is: “And no one would understand that she was irreplaceable.”

Mother thought the story was better than anything Ethan had written before, less pretentious, and I agreed, even though being titillated by a gendered umbrella struck me as another oddity in the catalogue of oddities that all together made up my brother. I had always been jealous of Ethan’s specialness. He always had to be handled so carefully, our eccentric boy with his stiff movements. He used to remind me of Pinocchio (before he became a real boy, of course). And he’d get so frustrated with stupid little things and throw tantrums. All the pounding on the floor, the howling and the kicking. Mother would hold him tightly in her arms and just let him wail. I was always told to “make allowances” for his “peculiarities.” Looking straight at her, I told Mother I had wanted peculiarities, too. I had wanted to get the special, Ethan boy-genius treatment, but I had been good old normal Maisie without a special bone in my body. I remember Mother looked shocked because I was so vociferous. She leaned across the table, took my hand, and said, “Maisie!”

I suppose I was peevish. I also suppose that my mother’s confession had opened the door to more confession, and that I had a perverse need to get some attention myself. I reiterated that it had always been all about Ethan, extra meetings with his teachers, long chats with him in his room before he could get to sleep, his special “medicine” that wasn’t medicine at all but a little concoction of cocoa, sugar, and milk, and that sometimes Mother hadn’t even demanded that he brush his teeth afterward. Mother sat back in her chair with wide eyes and said, “Go ahead, let me have it.” And I did. I went on for quite a while, but my letting-her-have-it reached its apex with a story that still hurt when I remembered it.

Ethan was sick. He was sick a lot with earaches, one earache after another, and Mother had made a bed for him on the living room sofa. She stayed with him all night. I couldn’t sleep and crept out of bed to go to her. I remember looking down at Ethan and at his stupid ears and, instead of whispering, I talked loudly, actually, maybe I yelled, and he woke up.

“And you were so angry,” I said, “you told me to ‘grow up and cut the crap.’” I wailed this sentence at my mother. The old emotion came blasting back, as if I were seven years old again and all hot with misery and a crusading sense of the injustice of it all. “You sent me away!” I yelled at her. “You sent me away!”

Mother looked at me sadly. Her face wrinkled up with that look of pained compassion I knew so well, but there was a little smile on her face, too, and she opened up her arms and said, “Come here, Maisie.”

And I walked around the table, and my mother pulled me onto her lap, and she folded her long arms around me. I closed my eyes and collapsed into her, my face pressed into her neck. She embraced me firmly. She kept a tight hold on me, and she rocked me back and forth for a long time, for several minutes, anyway, and as she rocked me, she stroked my hair and whispered into my ear, “God, how I love you.” The clutching, hard sensation I had had beneath my ribs loosened up completely, and for the time I sat in her lap, I forgot that I had grown up. I even forgot that I had a child myself, and I certainly forgot that I had a brother. She could do that, Mother could. When you least expected it, she would make some magic. It is ordinary magic, to be sure, but there are many people who do not know how to use it.

The evening of Mother and Phinny’s opening — Mother in the wings and Phinny in the spotlight — arrived in windy, blustering blow-your-hat-off weather. The city was in mourning, and everyone was still jumpy. A sudden noise, a plane overhead, a stalled subway train made us all freeze for a moment, and then go on. I left Oscar and Aven at home and grabbed a cab to Chelsea. Bruno didn’t come, because he was angry at Mother about the pseudonyms. Rachel came but didn’t stay too long. I remember her pointedly kissing both Mother and Phinny and offering them congratulations. Ethan was there with a very tall African woman, pretty, very thin, with narrow glasses. It turned out she was some sort of princess or other, who was getting her PhD in molecular biology, but my first impression was that if any person could resemble an umbrella, she did, a closed one, naturally.

I always notice how little the people who go to openings seem to care about the work. Some of them hardly glance at it. Others stand in front of a piece and stare at it for a while, but with no expression on their faces — blanks. When people came out of the Rooms, they were sweating and had slightly twisted expressions on their faces — a smiling discomfort. I had a feeling they were all reminded of what it was like to be a child again, to have to look up to the big people, and that it wasn’t the best feeling. I especially liked all the writing on the walls because it made me feel as if I’d gone inside a book, not literally walking on the pages, but as if I were actually moving around in the space between the words and the pictures you create in your mind when you read. I also experienced little puffs of memory rising up and then falling away, a half-known piece of some old place or thought, often a little painful, floating up in my mind for an instant and then vanishing.

Mother stood like a sentry against a wall with her arms folded. I remember she was wearing an elegant gray suit with a green scarf, her eyes narrowed in concentration. You’d think she would have hated giving it all away to Phinny — who was also in gray, a natty charcoal-gray suit with a red tie, and he was charming as all get-out and cracking jokes as usual. It worked because Phinny loved Mother. They were comrades in arms. He believed in the eventual revelation, in payback day, in vindication. She was his “date” that evening, and he ushered her around and acted the part of a new artist on the scene.

Still, people didn’t really know what to make of the work then. After all, Phinny had more or less dropped out of the blue. The question was how to interpret it. My father had been a player before the heroic chapter in American art closed. He had glimpsed “the Romantic cowboy era” of tragic, drunken glamour boys. My mother adored de Kooning. “Of all the big boys,” she liked to say, “I love de Kooning the most,” but it came together for those artists. A contagious hysteria fed their fame and glory. “Big, bad, and brutal,” Mother said. “Everyone loved it.” But even de Kooning was dumped on when the weather changed, when Pop Art and cold-and-bold took the stage.

There was no atmosphere for Phinny or for Mother, no art culture to raise them up and anoint the mask. Rune was the one in a position to succeed, to frame my mother’s gifts and sell them to the public. I feel sorry for Anton Tish, wherever he is. The flurry around him must have made him feel like a fraud. According to Mother, he had nurtured some notion of authenticity, and he had felt robbed of it. With Rune it was different. I doubt he was bothered by thoughts of originality. It’s awfully hard to know if anything is truly original, anyway. An original thing would be so foreign, we wouldn’t be able to recognize it, would we?

Rune came to the opening late, scattering his glamour dust around him. I felt it. Everyone felt it — that combination of Mr. Handsome and Mr. Famous. I had met him only once before, in my mother’s studio about a year earlier, and he had impressed me although we had hardly said a word to each other except “Nice to meet you.” I had walked into the studio with Aven to find my mother looking up at Rune, who was at the top of a ladder examining a sculpture that was hanging from the ceiling. On his way down, he had swung out from the ladder, which he had gripped with one hand, and then he had jumped to the floor, landing very softly. Somehow, he had made it seem as if he were not showing off, and I had found myself grinning in spite of myself. Aven was amazed and wanted to try the trick herself, but we persuaded her it was too dangerous. I had not forgotten either Rune’s smile or his handshake, and when he walked into the show, I couldn’t help looking at him. I was surprised when he rushed over to me and gave me a real double kiss — lips hit flesh — and planted himself in front of me as if I were the person he wanted to see most in the whole room.

Rune flirted with me. He looked at me intently, which is a form of flirting. I told him about the film I was making on the Barometer and how I had tracked down his brother and father and found out that his mother had died. I explained that psychiatrists no longer paid much attention to what their patients said, but that I had become fascinated by the Barometer’s language and cosmology. We talked about different cameras and how wide shots and close-ups create meanings and how hard it was to do black-and-white movies anymore. He loved cinema and was fun to talk to. I can’t remember exactly what he said to me then or how we got onto Mother, but he mentioned something about how difficult it must have been for Mother to be known as Felix Lord’s wife, and that he really liked her work, and I told him a story I now regret. Mother had run into an acquaintance on Park Avenue, a man who dealt in Old Master drawings. He and she had ducked into a place on Madison Avenue for a cup of tea to catch up. In the course of their conversation, my mother had mentioned that she was rereading Panofsky with great interest. And Larry had casually said, “Oh yes, Felix introduced you to all that, didn’t he? He was a big man for theory.” Mother told him that Father had never read a word of Panofsky, that whatever he had known about his work had come from her. She was livid. I explained to Rune that it had probably happened one too many times, and she couldn’t stand it anymore. Still, I told him, I wished she would just relax, just let it go. Although he didn’t say much, Rune listened to me with a gentle, sympathetic expression on his face.

At some point we stepped outside and sat on the steps and talked more. He cupped his hands to light a cigarette and smoked. He jittered his knee as he inhaled and exhaled. The wind blew. I had no intention of taking our flirtation anywhere, but it was enjoyable nevertheless. He liked me in navy blue. He approved. I was flattered, a tad nervous, and therefore loquacious. Anxiety makes me talk more, not less. Rune examined my palm and invented a comical future for me with four husbands and many adventures and a very long life, and when he held my hand, he traced the lines with his index finger. He went on to say he read noses, too, and touched mine. And then he brought up Father. He wanted to know what it had been like to be a child in my household, to have all those paintings around, to watch the “gods” come and go.

I told him kids don’t think about that — whatever is just is. He told me he had known Father “a little” back in the day, when he was first in New York. “You have his eyes.” I do have my father’s eyes, and somehow hearing this made me suddenly sorry for myself. I felt that I was looking at me from the outside. Poor thing, she’s tired, I thought. And then I realized I had been tired for years. I was trying to make a film. Aven was six, a demanding oddball of a kid, who took everything too hard. Oscar was feeling neglected by me. My mother was lost in her own world of metamorphs, phenomenology, and pseudonyms, and my dear father, who surely would have helped make the whole situation better, was dead. An involuntary sob escaped me.

“You worshiped your father, didn’t you?” Rune looked me straight in the eyes. I told him worship was not the right word, but it wasn’t the word as much as his intonation that made me feel awkward. He smiled. “I always had the feeling that Felix was a man who knew what he wanted.” I don’t know why, but I felt slightly alarmed. Then he added, “He had a great eye.” This meant nothing. It was what everyone said, but I felt vaguely distressed. I was wearing a scarf, and Rune picked up the end of it and began to play with the fringe. He had a souvenir, he said, from those days that he carried with him. He reached into his pocket and took out a key. He held it out to me in the palm of his hand.

I remember looking down at it, confused. I asked him what it was for. He said it was the key to a place that no longer existed. I asked him what it had to do with Father, and he said, “Don’t you know, Maisie?” I didn’t know, and I was annoyed. I stood up to leave, but he still had a grip on my scarf, and as I pulled away from him, it tightened around my neck. I demanded he let go, but he tugged me down toward him so my face was only inches from his, and he smiled broadly. I pushed him away, and he lifted his hands in the air, a surprised look on his face, as if it had all been an innocent joke. He accused me of being “touchy.” He was only “teasing” me. But I was shaken, and he knew it. How I wished later that I had been able to hide my dread, laugh at him, make some cutting remark, but I couldn’t.

I have never mentioned this to anyone. I’m telling it now for the first time, and I’ve wrestled with the fact that something so small could have felt so large. What had happened, after all? He had shown me a key that could have been any old key to any old door, and then he had implied that I should know about it. He had grabbed my scarf to prevent me from leaving. At the same time, he had charmed me, and I had felt attracted to him, more attracted than I had felt to a man in years. I had let him touch me, let him fiddle with my scarf. I had giggled at his jokes and had yattered on about my project. The instant he mentioned my father, however, the conversation had been twisted into another shape. Suddenly, it had turned rife with innuendo, as if this man had shared a story with Father, and the mood had changed. No, my mood had changed. He had remained unruffled. But I had felt humiliated, as if all that had gone before had been a prelude to a subtle moment of cruelty, a play on my doubts, doubts he seemed to know I had, doubts I could not talk about, not only because they frightened me but because I did not know what they were. I didn’t know what I was afraid of.

I can’t really say what went on between us. Whatever it was seemed to be as much about my father and mother as it was about me. We are always concocting theories about how the world works and why people act in the ways they do. We invent motives for them, as if it’s possible for us to know, but more often than not these explanations are like flimsy cardboard stage sets we put up in front of reality because they are simpler and less distracting than what’s actually there. I think I became a documentary filmmaker to try to get a truer view. It’s not that film can’t lie or distort or be used for dastardly purposes, it’s that sometimes the camera extracts from the faces and bodies of its subjects what they do not say aloud. I was sixteen when I first saw Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, and after that, I couldn’t stop thinking about the expressiveness of people’s hands when they are controlling their faces. I have often wondered what I might have seen in Rune if I had had a camera. Maybe nothing. After all, he was an expert at filming himself.

That night, as I lay in bed next to a snoring Oscar, I remembered Rune saying “Don’t you know, Maisie?” It had felt like an accusation. Did I know something? And then I remembered my father’s keys, the strange keys he had scooped up that morning when I was just a girl. I remembered standing in Green-Wood Cemetery and the glamorous white angel on a gravestone near Father’s plain one, and then I remembered visiting my mother a few months after Father died. I was there often, and the doorman let me up without phoning. When I rang the bell in the hall, Mother didn’t come to the door, even though she had to know it was me. The door was open, so I went in, and I heard the sound of retching from the guest bathroom in the hall off the dining room. I ran toward the sound and found my mother hunched over, her arms folded across her chest. Vomit shot from her mouth like a missile, not into the toilet but onto the seat and floor. There were tears in her eyes, and I took her arm. She said, “No, no, it’s okay. Leave me.” But another wave struck, and I was shocked to see the force of the heaving that convulsed her body. I grabbed her around the waist and held her forehead close to the toilet bowl. As a child when I threw up, Mother always held my forehead for comfort. “I can’t keep it down, Maisie.” She was gasping. “There’s something wrong with me. I can’t keep it down. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

I cleaned her mouth with a washcloth and walked her to the other end of the apartment and settled her into bed. She lay down. Then I left her and returned to the bathroom and cleaned the vomit with a big roll of paper towels, which one after another I discarded in a garbage bag. I remember the pungent smell that made me hold my breath, the yellow liquid slime with small brightly colored bits of food in it. I remember that I spilled some bleach, too, which left white spots on my jeans. I worked hard to make sure that no trace was left on the floor or walls or behind the toilet bowl. When I moved quietly down the hallway toward the bedroom, I heard the noise of Mother crying. She didn’t cry, at least not in front of me. She hadn’t cried at Father’s funeral or at Grandmother’s or Grandfather’s. Her sobs were strange, somehow inhuman. She sounded like a dog that makes strangled yelps and yowls when it tries to talk, and then came a long, hoarse shriek that made me stop short in the hall, an extended howl of agony. I felt my face contort as I leaned against the wall outside my parents’ bedroom, listening to my mother. I wanted to go to her, but I was afraid to look at her, afraid of her feeling. I waited. I waited for the worst to end. By the time I went in to her, she was calm. Again she apologized. I told her there was nothing to be sorry for.

There are nights when I can’t sleep, and I lie awake thinking about The Natural Mask, which means that I think about Mother and her story, and how to tell it in the film. I do not want it to be too neat and tidy. I do not want to explain away the mess. She would have hated that. Over and over, I have looked at my film of her just a year before she died. She is sitting in her studio beside the Empathy Box, talking into the camera. At one moment she speaks directly to me. She says my name, and when I hear it, I always feel a quickening inside me.

“We live inside our categories, Maisie, and we believe in them, but they often get scrambled. The scrambling is what interests me. The mess.”