The Blazing World

Harriet Burden Notebook O. The Fifth Circle (discovered by Maisie Lord, June 20, 2012)

June 5, 2001

On Nantucket alone, and I miss Bruno. He is with his “girls.” The wary Jenny, the pregnant Liza (bearing first grandchild), and the adoring Cleo. They keep their distance from their father’s lover, and I realized a few weeks ago I don’t care. They do not have to like me. Maisie and Oscar and Aven will come next week. Ethan may come. My son: Mr. Maybe. I long for signs of affection from my buttoned-up boy. I imagine the great long hug, a sudden blurting of love and admiration for me, his ma, but that is not his way. I cannot remake Ethan. Like me, he reads. He reads all the time, and he reads women these days, Simone Weil, Suzanne Langer, Frances Yates. Hope for the earth. But he is severe, an avenger of the downtrodden, an enemy of the system. Sell the Nantucket house! Sell the art! Divest and scatter the funds for redistribution. Ethan Lord in sackcloth and ashes. There are days when he reminds me of a Jesuit priest performing the spiritual exercises over and over as purification. And I founder and fall, unclean and guilty. Mercifully, today on the phone, he hopped off the track and asked me if I’d ever read Bachelard’s The Poetics of Reverie, and I quoted a line to him: “Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young.” And Ethan chuckled and said, But I think you have to be old to know that. And I received the chuckle as love.

Little Ethan marches into the house after a day at kindergarten. I see him carry a stack of puzzles into his closet, turn on the light, sit down, and close the door behind him. I know what he is doing. He begins one, finishes it, and starts the next. After half an hour, I knock gently on the door and call out to him in my cartoon voice, Any reports from the closet? Twelve, he sings back at me, or fourteen, or sixteen.

Felix speaks in the darkness of the bedroom: “Do you think the child is normal?”

Yes, yes, yes, I would say. He just has a different pattern of mind.

Many shades of Felix in the house: both caresses and slaps. His wellies stand in the hallway, and I conjure his ghost heading for the beach in an icy rain, and I remember how it aroused me to see the Felix of suits and ties in an old sweater and blue jeans, that here on Nantucket he was nearly another man when he was not on the telephone. Today I touched the stones that are still piled in the wide, shallow crystal bowl on the dresser, a little dusty. He gathered them one by one over the years. He liked to cover them with water to bring out their color. Last year, I did not even notice them, did not think of them. This year I am all wounded feeling as I look down at the stones. I remember throwing a magazine at him and his surprised look. Pay attention! I yelled. It’s time you paid attention. The collage of photographs in the kitchen: Ethan and fish — the terrified six-year-old hoists a small bluefish in the air. A radiant Maisie in her father’s arms, her upper lip a little moist with dirt and snot. Felix is turned to her, reflective, soft, the corner of his mouth raised. This house. I am wading in the ruins of was.

Rune arrives tomorrow. It would have been silly to keep the visit from Bruno, so I didn’t. A long weekend. Thursday to Sunday. Project talk. I want to study him further. He is right for the part, but I must discover the work.

Remember: Straight Wharf tomorrow for swordfish, bluefish pâté, those little crackers.

I’ve been watching The Diary. It goes on and on. There is too much to see. The visual glut of too much.

A moment when I stopped the movie: a lackey is filming Rune at a party. That means there are two cameras. One seen. One invisible. Rune is smiling, gesticulating. His eyes narrow in interest as he chats up a woman with a magenta bob and narrow green glasses. He laughs, a big cackle, waves goodbye, and turns toward the unseen camera. But in his face there is no sign of the animation immediately past. The transition is too violent. Our feelings usually linger for a few seconds anyway. I ask myself what lies under his conviviality.

Thursday, June 7, 2001

I picked him up at the airport at 1:30, and his big smile and broad wave made me feel instantly guilty about the thoughts I had last night. He teased me about my truck, my beloved junk heap, but it runs and runs.

Praise for the house — a real beach house, not a McMansion, not an overblown summer place like some of those horrors in the Hamptons. I showed him the studio. Showed him some of my little people in the chorus for Blazing. All their mouths are open in song.

Ate the swordfish with relish and drank wine. We looked out onto the beach and the tall moving grasses that grew nearly black against the night sky, a cobalt blue — straight from the tube. Only a few moments of strangeness when I thought, What is he doing here? What am I doing? Maybe I am the mad scientist.

I watched Rune move. I remarked silently on his grace. This is helpful in the world — grace. His left hand (I understood today that he is left-handed) flies out open-palmed for emphasis, and his speech rolls out of him, not too fast, and with little emotion. His voice is low and soothing, and he smiles only at long intervals, but when he does, it feels as if I am being rewarded. He is curious and has read all kinds of books, but it is not what he says that seduces. It is his belief in his own power to seduce.

After dinner, we lay on the two red sofas in the living room. He smoked, and I inhaled the smell of cigarettes, an odor reminiscent of my marriage. I have learned that there is no debate of ideas with Rune, no point for a rational point to be made between us. He is a man of the scattershot and sporadic, of apt quotations, remembered dates, unlikely pairings, and non sequiturs. April 1938: Eight days after Austria voted for the German Anschluss, Superman made his first appearance on the American stage. The Marquis de Sade, he informed me, was born on June 2, 1740. The very next day, June 3, King Frederick the Great of Prussia ascended the throne and, as one of his first decrees, abolished torture. I am not surprised that Rune takes a fashionable interest in Sade, in desire as repetition, in bodies as machines, in the man’s bleak extension of Enlightenment clockwork to sexuality. Do you fancy yourself a libertine? I asked him. And he said no, just an information-processing machine with inputs and outputs attached to a potent sex drive. He quoted Nietzsche: “Man is something to be overcome.” (He is loose and fast with Nietzsche.)

In a single beat, he jumped to J. G. Ballard and the man’s 1970 exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Lab. Better than Duchamp, better than Warhol, he said. Crashed Cars is the art exhibit par excellence. Ballard’s book Crash heralded “the new sublime,” an erotic explosion of metal and glass and dismemberment. But more than the glories of the smash-up, Ballard was a soothsayer, a juggernaut, a harbinger of what was still to come. Hadn’t art museums become Disney palaces, just as he had predicted? Hadn’t the oracle said, “Sooner or later, everything turns into television”?I Hadn’t he said, “In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one’s legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace”?II When I wondered what the latter statement meant, Rune said, Isn’t it obvious? I said, Not at all, not at all, but he had moved on to Philip K. Dick and all things Phildickian, and how he loved him, too, another great shaman of our age, born in 1928, dead in 1982, still young, only fifty-four — a paranoid, addicted, five times married, hallucinating, quasi-religious maniac, but oh so wonderful. Hadn’t Dick said, “Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked”?

I asked him if Dick had advocated a three-value logic. Boolean logic has two values, too, I said, essential to computing. Three values includes true, false, and the unknown or ambiguous. Was that what he had proposed? Was he thinking larger? About Gödel’s incompleteness theory? Does he really understand it?III

Rune is used to impressing people with such statements but unused to defending them. Despite his ignorance, he just grins, extends his open palm, and tells me I’m too serious.

What if I were like that? What if I just waved contradictions aside? It would be pleasant to play the blasé hero, bloated with himself, collecting admiring glances for the half-baked and the ill-conceived.

I see my father in my mind. Your logic, Father, was about the consistency of relations, not the murk of so-called real life. It was bounded logic. That was its problem. Your true and false propositions function perfectly in their own hermetic sphere.

It is a mistake to apply logic to human life as a whole, to think logic will “wake up” machines.

But then Rune relates that once upon a time there were two Dicks, Philip K. and his twin, Jane Charlotte, who died when she was six weeks old, and the little girl ghost haunted the brother’s writing. Philip K., it seems, blamed his mother for Jane’s death. The foul womb killed his sister? He had been in there with her, after all. The mother had neglected her for him? Alas, I didn’t get the details. Rune was on a roll.

The dead girl child led us to mirrors and doubles and ghosts that never leave us, and the old story about the two sexes as the cleaved halves of a single whole being. He told me about his sister Kirsten, to whom he had always told his secrets. They had invented a code when they were children to send messages to each other their parents couldn’t read, and they called the code Runsten. They had built a fort from boxes and scrap lumber, and inside their fort they had dissected the body of a dead baby bird. And I told him about my mother’s miscarriages and that I had always wondered if my father hadn’t wanted a boy. Maybe one of those who had died had been a boy.

Later, he rattled on about artists I’d never heard of, and I understood he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the now — what’s in the Chelsea galleries this minute. It was impressive, but after a while my mind left his words for my own silent ones, the ones who think they have a right to be young and wander off to look for new meanings, and I interrupted him at one point to bring up our work. I said the project would have to disguise the line of suture, the incision between his art and mine. I had to know more about him. It was a question of becoming.

Becoming me?

No, I said to him, double consciousness. You and I together. I am hoping you will goad me into something else. My voice rose. Goad me into the dizziness of exile.

His face went dead, blank, as I had seen him on the film. No answer.

With your name on my work, I said, it will be different. Art lives in its perception only. You are the last of three, and you are the pinnacle. I could hear the cracking passion in my voice. I altered my tone to one of calm deliberation.

He liked the idea of pulling a fast one, but my ideas felt outdated, a little lame to him. We live in a postfeminist age of gender freedom, transsexuality. Who cares which is which? There are lots of women in art now. Where is the battle?

No, I said to him, it’s more than sex. It’s an experiment, a whole story I am making. Two down, one to go. After that, I retire from the game. We will find a project, I said. Hadn’t his work The Banality of Glamour focused mostly on women’s faces and bodies? Surely he knew that women face pressures men don’t. I had suffered from the cruelty of the beauty culture. I knew what I was talking about.

He smiled a gentle smile, and he said, Harry, you have your own style, your own elegance, your own femininity. He wanted to be kind, but I boiled — fists clenched, fury rising. He had offered me condescension, compensation. Don’t worry, Harry, you count, too, he was saying, even if you are funny-looking. I bristled at him and growled, But that’s not the point. The point is the trap, the suffocation. I turned away.

No pique from him: You want to wear me for one exhibition. It was a good phrase, “wear me.”

I told him yes, that was it exactly, except that by “wearing” him I might find something else in myself. This is what I was trying to explain.

He licked his teeth and asked me what that something might be.

I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Little talk after that. I’m tired now, very tired.

Tomorrow the masks come out.

Friday, June 8, 2001

Hid all day without speaking to him. I had notified him of the house rules: He had to find his own breakfast and lunch. I watched him through the studio window, loping toward the beach, book in hand, saw him lean over and brush sand from his heel, then light a cigarette. I have already dug out a couple of Felix’s ashtrays for Rune. I kept thinking of his surgical videos while I worked on a head for a sculpture. The controlled mutilations made me think of his beloved crashes — a bloody aesthetic.

Faces. The face. Locus of identity. What the world sees. My old face.

What happened today in the studio, Harry? Think it through.

Harry, you were worried. You were anxious. Be honest. When you unwrapped the masks, you were a little frightened, weren’t you? But why?

Because you weren’t sure he would play. Is that it?

But when he saw them, your man face and your woman face, when he saw your face masks, he smiled, and then he ran his finger over the woman and took her up and put the face over his own.

He took it off and examined it. They’re both so blank, he said.

I made them blank.

Like Noh masks, he said, and I said, a little like Noh masks, but light and flexible. The difference between the two is very slight, in the chin.

I want to use them, I said, as part of the experiment for our work together. We’ll change sex and play a game, a theater game. It’ll be fun, I said. Are you up for it?

Are there rules? he said.

No rules, I said. He would find a woman, and I would find a man.

He wanted to film it with a stationary camera. He could set it up quickly. He would add it to the Diary.

Loss of air in your chest, Harry. Increased heartbeat, a feeling of danger. Why? Were you frightened by that machine’s eye? Will I look bad? Will I look ridiculous? I insisted he give me a copy. He agreed. But there’s more, Harry. Examine yourself. Weren’t you afraid you were opening a door you might not be able to close?

It is almost midnight, but I must write it down now, or I will lose the immediacy, lose the force of it, because whatever is on that damned film, it’s not my insides, not my perceptions, not the magic of transformation.

It moved slowly at first. We were awkward, silly. I told him I was John. He hated John. Why John? Such a bland name. I had to explain that I had played John as a girl. John’s adventures. Captain John on the ship in a hurricane, Soldier John killing Nazis, John in the caves. I did not say that I alternated between being John and being Mary, Mary who was rescued by John, swooning, delicate Mary who loved being saved. I agreed to give up John. Dumb name, okay. As soon as Rune had put the mask on, he began to wriggle and mince and roll his shoulders up and down. I told him sharply he was a woman, not a drag queen. No woman moves like that, for Christ’s sake, and he shot back, Wanna bet? But he stopped the ridiculous parody after a few minutes. He told me he was Ruina.

A nutty name, I said, but Ruina is kind of funny. A ruined woman. Poor ruined Ruina/Rune.

The mask changes everything.

It changes far more than I had imagined when we began the game.

Rune began to vanish.

I looked at that empty face with its soft, pink, expressionless mouth, arched brows, and narrow chin with the thick elastic band that held it in place over his ears. Rune lifted his voice to a higher pitch and spoke more softly. He said he liked to draw. Then he looked down at his lap, then upward again. His eyes through the holes held mine for a moment before he looked away. I must try to explain this to myself. Why did this series of movements feel like a blow to my skull? He was making a character, wasn’t he? I took a breath. Under the mask, I felt my skin grow hot. Masks do not move, but when I looked at him/her, it was as if I saw the fixed lips tremble, as if in this act of looking down, up, and away he had captured something feminine, and I found it terrible.

Richard, I said, Richard Brickman. The name appeared in my mouth, and I spoke it. Looking at it now, written on the page, I am smiling. Richard, as in Lionhearted, as in the Third, as in Tricky Dick, as in dicks and pricks, more pricks than kicks. What’s in a name? The choice is hilarious. And bricks? Need we go into it? Hard, of course. Stable, of course. The three little pigs, of course. Remember, Harry, whose house stands? And he blew and he blew and he blew, but he couldn’t blow the house down. And the man in Brickman? Harry, you’re Mr. Overdetermined himself.IV But he came, Richard Brickman came, coming like a wind blown from old Harry’s blue lungs into the purple space between him and Ruina, that shrinking pinky of a girl. She had a story. She had dreams, big, little, pathetic dreams of grandeur. Rune was making her up for me, for Richard. She was not an artist, no, just an illustrator. Her grand ambitions were to draw and paint for children’s books. Where had he found this shy, hopeful creature? I wonder now, but I didn’t wonder then. In his mother, his sister? I was too caught up in Richard and Ruina, in the miracle of their talk.

I sat across from the mask, Ruina, with the brilliant light of the afternoon sun behind her. The faded red of the sofa’s cotton at her back, I watched her play with a cushion in her lap. My posture changed. I sat with my legs open, and I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. But can you draw? I demanded. Can you draw?

She didn’t want to brag, you see, but she could draw some, and she was getting better, and she was hoping for a break, an introduction, perhaps. I might be able to help her. The masked head went up and down and back and forth. She was in motion, our Ruina, a bobbling head of hesitation and nervous laughter. It was so hard for her to ask. She didn’t like to do it, and a new high note of pleading entered her voice.

As she wheedled and sighed, I began to find her contemptible. Pull yourself together. If you want something, ask for it straight out.

And then, horribly, Ruina began to whisper. I could hardly hear her. Was she asking for a favor? Her head fell forward, and she spoke so softly under her breath that the words ran together in a murmur of sounds.

Speak up! I, Richard, was telling her to speak up. I didn’t shout. I ordered her to speak clearly so that I could hear her. What was the point of a conversation with a person who could not be understood, who could not get a sentence out of her mouth without mumbling? We would get nowhere.

She whined. The sound of her whining made me close my eyes, made me wince. You disgust me. You sound like a kicked dog. Who said that? Richard said it, cruel bastard that he is.

High protestations from Ruina followed. She is suddenly enlivened. In her feeble way, she fights back. Her voice rises into new registers, high, splitting sounds of pain. That’s mean. You’re a mean, horrible man. Blubbering follows.

I am not mean. I am reasonable. You hear me. I am just speaking rationally. You, on the other hand, are acting like a hysterical child. I ask you to stop right now, immediately.

Ruina is crying. She is holding the pillow to the masked face. I imagine that the mask moves. I see the corners of the mouth move downward, and I feel the wrinkling of the forehead. I feel invigorated by my anger. Richard stands up and walks to the sofa in three swift strides. He grabs her by the shoulders and begins to shake her. She is loose as a rag doll. I lift my hand to smack her hard. The masked head is thrown back, and Rune is laughing. The laugh enrages me. The laugh storms inside me. I lift my hands from Rune’s shoulders. I make a noise, a hollow grunt. The game is over.

We take off the masks.

I feel shaken, a bit shocked. Rune is jovial. He repeats this sentence: We have it on film.

But Richard and Ruina have unsettled me. I told him so as he snipped the rubber bands off the steamed lobsters. Why had it gone in that direction? Who had led the way? Why had he made Ruina so wimpy? Is that his idea of what women are? I wanted to talk about it, but he said that I always wanted to interpret everything, and enough was enough. It had been fun, hadn’t it? And I felt both oddly relieved by his humor and still troubled. Our conspiracy, he said, was interesting, damned interesting, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to let it go yet.

He talked about an artist friend who had hanged himself last year. A woman he loved had left him.

It must be terrible for her, I said.

And he said that some deaths are more beautiful than others.

I said I didn’t find death beautiful, except maybe the perfect death, dying in one’s sleep at a hundred.

God, that’s boring, he said.

I must think it through now. I must find some distance. Harry is trying to understand what has happened.

Saturday, June 9, 2001

I called Rachel this morning. We talked for almost an hour. I wanted to tell her about Richard Brickman, but something stopped me: shame. I am ashamed of both Richard and Ruina.

Ray has had a stent put in his artery.

Who are you, anyway, Harry, a wimp? Who cares about this little theatrical event? Isn’t the world in thrall to actors, especially to those who press themselves to extremes, who starve themselves for authenticity, who rage and gnash their teeth and turn themselves into demented patients or idiots savants or leering, cannibal psychopaths? Are we not all malleable beings made of putty, who can be pulled and pressed and reconfigured? Doesn’t all art partake of this extension into others? What’s the big deal? This was next to nothing, no violence at all — just a shaking of shoulders — a little anger, a laugh. Why worry?

Because Brickman was there, fully formed. Who is that man?

And yet, consider this, too: He may be the avenue to the project. Didn’t I say it: the dizziness of exile? Exile into the other.

I called Bruno, too. (I will never tell him about the masks.)

Cleo is his salvation, but I knew that. Jenny needles him. Liza is taciturn but much sweeter to her old dad. He tells me, in a typical soaring moment of hyperbole, that he has botched fatherhood, and I tut-tut the comment because it isn’t true. They want to see him, after all. They leave their spouses to come to Papa. And Liza has let him feel the movements of the fetal boy under her skin, the first grandchild, and he wonders why this unborn child is so much more exciting for him than the first time around. And I tell him he was afraid then, and he isn’t afraid now. He doesn’t have to take care of it, and we laugh, and soon he makes some comments about my clit, “ever on alert,” he says, and how his tongue longs for it, the clit, and I make a few false moans on the telephone, and he yuks it up. Laughter is a boon. He asks me about my gigolo, the slithering pretty boy, but his tone is not cruel, and so I take it. I tell him the project is coming along and that it’s “interesting,” borrowing Rune’s word. Yes, it’s interesting. And then we can’t wait to see each other, and he hopes Francis, Liza’s lawyer husband, whom I’ve never met, will not insist they call the baby Brandon — so sissy, so meatless. How could Bruno tolerate a grandson named Brandon? He plans to write here on the island. We do not mention the bloody poem. He knows what I think — write the memoir!

It wasn’t easy to work today with the resonant anxiety beneath my ribs.

At four, I found him lying on the sofa reading a book on Houdini. He waved it in the air and delivered facts — the man’s father had been a rabbi in Appleton, Wisconsin; Houdini loved his wife, Bess. Twenty years before Kafka published his Metamorphosis, the two Houdinis, husband and wife, traded places in a locked trunk and called the act Metamorphosis. (The German word is Verwandlung, but Rune lives entirely in English.) The master magician could regurgitate small keys at will, dislocate and relocate his shoulders at will, and had learned by practicing in an oversized bathtub to hold his breath for three minutes. Rune said he, too, was practicing not to breathe, and when I asked him why, he said he had his own projects.

He wanted to play again, change masks. I’ll be Richard, he said. I thought to myself, that’s impossible, you can’t be Richard, you don’t know him, but I didn’t say it. I said, no, another time. I wasn’t up to it. We talked some more, but just blather, and then he said, I think Ruina should get her revenge on the bastard, don’t you? I must have looked confused. If we keep the game going, he said, she’ll have to fight back, won’t she? I had to think about it. I understood I had cut myself off from the ongoing story out of dread.

Rune thought the film sequence could be used outside the Diary. We’ll put it into a piece, he said, maybe your piece for me. I felt him watching me. I tried to be blasé. But what if it’s bad? I said. He had already watched it several times, and he wanted to see it on a larger screen. He could hook it up to the television.

We watched the masked aliens in silence. I noticed that I had forgotten large chunks of our dialogue and that the game had lasted longer than I had thought. As a spectator, I saw immediately that without the masks the exchange would have lost its power. As it was, I felt startled by the vapid dialogue. The authoritarian Richard and the cringing Ruina were types lifted straight from melodrama or soap opera, but their immobile, artificial faces — my empty creations — enhanced the archetypal character of their struggle, and their gestures took on a quality of pathos.

Pathosformel?V

Master and slave locked in their contest for recognition?VI

Role-playing gone mad?

Cultural parody written in capital letters?

Was this TV show the objective view? I noted that my green sweater had lost its shape and hung loosely over my substantial breasts, that beneath the man mask, my own flaccid chin fell into a neck with no Adam’s apple, and that my hair floated out around the false face in a frizzed halo, but somehow these physical details did not feminize Richard. They were overpowered by the mask and its, or his, decisive movements. And despite Rune’s rounded biceps, broad shoulders, and flat chest, his quivering Ruina, crunched up in a ball and crying by the end, read as womanly. Performativity.VII The particulars of the room, with its fireplace, big conch on the mantel, and Calder print on the wall, were submerged by the raw emotion that passed between the two players. Was it pretend? We watched it again.

Rune leaned forward. His elbows rested on his knees, his chin cupped in his hands — his body tense with concentration. What had he seen? I asked him. I think we were good, he said. We plunged right in. You believe it. It’s so fake, but you believe it.

I told him to run it again without sound.

He did it automatically, which surprised me a little. He seemed to understand. We watched. Without the voices, the film became all masks and movement. I didn’t look at Rune beside me on the sofa, but I felt him. I may have heard him breathing. I don’t know, but he did not stir, and neither did I. The two people on the screen had been changed again. The two had spoken from behind the motionless lips of the masks, but this time we listened to nothing. The static faces appeared to speak because they nodded and lifted their hands, but without words, and I watched the two of them perform a dance that in silence had become alarmingly erotic. Ruina’s gestures had a seductive quality that inflamed Richard’s brutality and the pleasure he took in it.

I felt Richard again, felt his desire to smack the cowering girl silly. Without his pedestrian speeches, my figment seemed to grow in stature. But as the final seconds rolled around again, I wondered who exactly was laughing at the end. Was it Rune or Ruina? I had thought that Rune had burst out of character, that he had broken the fourth wall, but now I wasn’t sure. It seemed to me that she, Ruina, was laughing inside the game, which added another layer of pretense or, at the very least, complicated the imaginary realm. I felt disoriented.

I said to him, Who was laughing?

Rune gave me a puzzled look.

I pressed him. I said again, Who was laughing? You or Ruina? He just stared at me. I spoke to him sharply. I said, Tell me.

He leaned back in the sofa and folded his arms. Are you being Richard now?

No, I said, I’m Harry. I could feel anger tighten my chest and throat.

Tom, Dick, and… he said to me.

I lowered my voice and said I was serious.

He joked and said, “The mask made me do it. The mask made me do it.” Then he accused me of being too serious. I had started it, hadn’t I? Games were meant to be fun. Was I worried about which of us had won, for Christ’s sake? It hadn’t been scripted. What came out of us had come out. Who cared? Where was my sense of humor?

Where was your sense of humor, Harry, that glorious feeling for the ridiculous? Who was that masked man galloping across the television screen? Wasn’t it you? Laugh loudly! Do not turn back now, Harry. You two are partners in the masked dance, and its steps will mean nothing if they are danced alone. Are you not double in the game? Johannes and Cordelia, John and Mary, Richard and Ruina? And why did you drone on about Dora Maar to Rune if you weren’t doubling yourself yet again without even knowing it?

There you were, Harry, on the red sofa beside Rune, telling him about Picasso sighting Maar at a café in Paris, her fingers splayed on the table in front of her as she stabbed the spaces between her fingers with a knife. When she missed, she bled. Five-fingered fillet. Picasso saved her gloves as a trophy.

Picasso painted Maar as the crying woman, as Spain in mourning, but the he-goat loved to make women cry. As the tears tumbled, the goat’s penis stiffened. What a buoyant, energetic little misogynist Picasso was! And you told Rune the whole story, about Maar’s Surrealist photos, the sublime Ubu that won a prize in 1936 among them, and her not-as-wonderful paintings. You told him about how she broke down after Picasso left her, about her analysis with Jacques Lacan, about the hideous chair with steel bars and hairy ropes Picasso wrapped up and sent her as a present and the rusty shovel blade she mailed to him, a game of gifts they played together. And then the package that was found in 1983 among Picasso’s possessions: a signet ring he had designed and engraved with the letters P D, pour Dora. Inside the circlet was a spike.

The man who unwrapped the ring was horrified, but, I said to Rune, it must have been meant as an allusion to Maar’s knife game, don’t you think? To look at the ring is to see a bleeding finger.

No one can play alone, I said. Even when there is no one else in the room, there must be an imaginary other.

I found the quote from Cocteau for Rune: “Picasso is a man and a woman deeply entwined. He is a living ménage. Dora is a living concubine with whom he is unfaithful to himself. From this ménage marvelous monsters are born.”

We are all a ménage, I said to him.

And then Rune said, A long time ago someone told me you were brilliant, just brilliant.

Who? I said, but he couldn’t remember. It was someone who knew me or had known me. It might have been at a party. It’s true, he said. You are.

I was so pleased. Slathered up with the compliment, I felt yielding, pliable, happy. Shine a warm light on poor old Harry and she turns into melted butter.

We were silent then and listened to the ocean. Let’s go down to the beach, I said. And we did. The moon was a crack of light only, a gleaming pale space in the sky briefly uncovered by the thick moving clouds, and we looked up at those cumulus depths with their illuminated grays, and I suppose we saw the same thing, because he whistled. We trotted down to the water and let the surf wash over our feet and felt its drag on our ankles as it withdrew. I felt we were friends.

It was only an hour ago, but in memory I have already changed the view. I find that odd. I am no longer inside myself. I see the two of us from behind, standing on the beach, two tall, dim silhouettes in the compromised moonlight. At some point, we turn and walk up the beach and down the path of gray wooden planks that leads to the house. When he bids me good night, he smiles. He says that it has been a great day, a banal phrase, but that is what we say, don’t we? It’s been a great day.

Then he kissed me lightly on both sides of my face and said good night again.

Sunday, June 10, 2001

Coda:

Tonight I luxuriated in the empty house, ate pasta with heaps of vegetables, read Emily Dickinson. She blazes.

Mine — by the Right of the White Election!

Mine — by the Royal Seal!

Mine — by the Sign in the Scarlet prison—

Bars — cannot conceal!

Rune, on the other hand, is a lowly jingle that has dug a trench in my mind and plays again and again. He lingers as a song of doubt. I see his tanned face at dinner as I listen again to his talk about AI, facile and adolescent, but somehow alive: “Machine and human libido.” I have invented new pictures for him: a towheaded boy with his head in sci-fi novels. I see him build a machine in his backyard. I see him in a darkened movie theater, his eyes lit by the screen as he watches an alien invasion. He must have felt like an alien out there in Iowa with his sister. I see cornfields and red barns. I have never been to Iowa. I am painting by the numbers.

Yesterday — I think it was yesterday — he inscribed a quote in the sand with a shell as we sat on the beach. It was from Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto,” 1909: “We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the angels fly.” When I told him Marinetti was mad and repulsive, he said he loved the mad and the repulsive. He loved fire, hatred, and speed. There is beauty in violence, he said. No one wants to acknowledge that, but it is true. I looked at his lower arm, brown under the white linen shirt he was wearing, the sleeves rolled to his elbows, a baseball cap on his head. I argued with him. It was a fascist aesthetic, I said, and in order to see beauty in maiming and bloodshed, one had to be far removed from those involved. But Rune has learned that the swift verbal or visual kick will prod strong reactions, which he can then lie back and enjoy. He falls into easy insurrection, the kind for which no one pays a price. But this persona is perfect for my plan. They will sit up and notice.

It is the dark thing, the inexplicable lump of a thing that gives you real doubts, Harry. And the dark thing is not in Rune but in you, isn’t it? It is in you as Richard Brickman. And Rune knows this. He is sensitive to undercurrents, just as you are. I see him pick up the mask and put it on. That is what you wanted, isn’t it? You wanted to play. But there is the fear of the burning arousal between your legs born of the game, out of control. The secret: I am not attracted to Rune, except when I’m Richard and he’s Ruina, but in order to play one has to take both parts. There’s a confession. Do I dare tell Dr. F.?

I am responsible for the drama (or whatever it was). I, Mistress of the Masks, have created the whole shebang. Rune played along with it, nothing more. He played well. He was game, but it was my show, wasn’t it? Where is the boundary between the two inventions, Harry, the absurd masked beings on the screen? Can you draw the line? Have you given too much away? Are you vulnerable? That is the melody of your doubt.

And now, as you write these words, you see your not-yet-old father sitting in silence at the end of the table in the Riverside Drive apartment, a speechless statue. Then you see your old mother many years later wearing her lilac robe in the hospital. She is telling you the story of how he punished her for wanting to speak. He punished her by saying nothing, and you, Harry, blurt out the words, That was cruel! He was cruel! Your mother agrees. It was cruel.

Of this I am certain: There has been more than one turn of the screw.

I. J. G. Ballard, The Day of Creation (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 64.

II. J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (London: Fourth Estate, 1990), 27.

III. The popular quote about Aristotelian logic is from a character in Dick’s novel VALIS, not from Dick himself. In her notebooks, Burden frequently returns to what she calls “the limits of logic.” Her attempt to engage Rune in a discussion of various forms of logic fails. Boolean logic, named after the nineteenth-century mathematician George Boole, is an algebraic binary system in which all values can be reduced to true or false, a logic fundamental to the design of computer hardware. Paraconsistent three-valued logic systems are designed to retain forms of traditional logic but also tolerate inconsistencies: “the unknown or the ambiguous.” In 1931, Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem demonstrated that any system of mathematics or logic cannot be both consistent and complete because it must rely on unproven assumptions that lie outside the system.

IV. “Overdetermined: The fact that formations of the unconscious (symptoms, dreams, etc.) can be attributed to a plurality of determining factors.” J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 292. Burden suggests that her sudden coming upon the name Brickman is derived from multiple unconscious sources.

V. The art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) developed the term Pathosformel to describe the emotive formula of visual representations. For Warburg, works of art were charged with psychic energies expressed in a gestural language. See Warburg’s The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles, Calif.: Getty Research Institute, 1999).

VI. Burden is referring to the master/slave chapter in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, in which the philosopher argues that self-consciousness is achieved only through an agonistic battle with the other.

VII. Judith Butler coined the term performativity: “Gender proves to be performance, that is, constituting an identity it is purported to be. In this sense gender is always a doing, though not a doing by the subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed.” In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 25.