Siri Hustvedt - The Blazing World

That vision kicked him loose. It kicked loose the kid, the base stealer, the poet of pizzazz, of confidence, and that lost charmer, the original Kleinfeld, returned, at least for a moment, and I (for it was I, the Bruno Kleinfeld of old) wiped my ass hastily but thoroughly, grabbed the jeans and shirt lying in a heap before me, whisked my jacket off the hook near the door with its four locks, checked the pocket for keys, hurtled down the stairway, out the door into the street, and chased the lady like some half-cocked troubadour. I yelled, “Stop!”

She stopped and turned. She wasn’t my Harry yet. Oh no, she was the lady with the coats, who had swiveled on her boot heels to look down at me. She was tall, and the childlike look of vulnerability was nowhere to be seen. Her brows came together disdainfully, and I felt the loser rising up, the miserable faker, but it was too late. I stuck out my hand. “Bruno Kleinfeld, your neighbor. I wanted to meet you.”

Harry, the stranger, smiled just a little, and took my hand. “Good to meet you, Mr. Kleinfeld,” she said.

I kid you not, the sun came out from behind a cloud at that very moment and lit up the street, and I grabbed the moment, for that is what we must do if we don’t want women to pass us by, and I said, “A fateful luminosity!”

She looked confused. What had I meant? What did she think I had meant? I could see her struggle to understand. She smiled, embarrassed.

“The gods approve!” I blurted.

She examined me silently. I have rarely known anyone who took such a long time between sentences. Finally, she said, “Of what, Mr. Kleinfeld?”

She reminded me of Mrs. Curtis, my ninth-grade biology teacher at Horace Mann. Of what, Mr. Kleinfeld? This is America. Who says, “Of what, Mr. Kleinfeld?” except high school teachers?

“Of us,” I said, “of our fortuitous meeting.”

“I thought fortuitous meant by accident, by chance. It looks to me as if you’ve chased me down.”

Harry and I agreed on the dialogue up to that point, word for word. The exchange was branded into what would become our mutual brain. We tussled over the next part of the scene. I still swear up and down and across and under and in every direction that I dove right in and asked her to dinner. She swore that we went round and round with the word fortuitous and that I had obviously blocked it out because she got the better of me in the etymology department. Latin, forte —by chance. The word does not mean “fortunate.” I know that! I had merely hoped that she had not noticed my wild pursuit of her post-dump (which she knew nothing about until later when I confessed that she had brightened my bowel movements many a day). Harry had a pedantic side, a persnickety grammar-teacher side that sometimes made me nuts. You thought about fortuitous , and you thought you said what you thought about it, but you never did. It happens. It happens. That’s what I told her, but she didn’t believe me.

I’m not sure which Bruno Kleinfeld showed up at the restaurant three nights later. The character who shaved beforehand was the same old louse of useless recriminations. What woman would want the asshole in the mirror who’s been writing the same poem for twenty-five years, who teaches two creative writing classes at Long Island University for twelve thousand dollars a year, who does freelance copyediting and a book review here and there for next to nothing, who’s a failure with a capital F ? Anxiety cramped my lungs, and I puffed shallow breaths while I ironed my good shirt, the one my daughter Cleo had given me for my birthday the March before. On top of that, I’d borrowed the hundred bucks to take Harry out from Louise, the woman down the hall, who had waggled her finger at me and said in her screeching voice, “This isn’t charity, Bruno, you’ve got to pay me back!” My heart was running a marathon while I stood stock-still, and I had started to sweat in the clean, pressed shirt. The tension was paralyzing. I stood in front of my door for about five minutes. The force that pushed me through it was loneliness — the bad, restless, anguished, pulverizing kind of loneliness I felt I couldn’t abide anymore.

And then, after the how-do-ye-do and the glances at the stiff paper menu and the ordering and the waiter who tells you his name is Roy or Ramon, in short after all the awkward pleasantry that goes on whenever two strangers embark on that voyage known as going-out-to-dinner, the gods or the angels or the fairies or the movie stars — any one of those unreal heavenly beings we all half believe in when convenient — smiled down on us as we sailed from salads of baby greens into a chicken dish we both ordered, a bit dry, with mushrooms. But while we were ingesting the desiccated fowl, it happened again: The authorized Bruno came roaring back in triumph to charm the Lady of the Coats, who charmed him back because she was funny and smart and oblique, too, making arcane comments even the full-blown genuine Bruno couldn’t really penetrate, but which made him awfully curious; and when the lady breathed, her breasts breathed with her, and he had to shut his eyes a couple of times to keep his head on straight.

I think there were diamonds in her ears, and I know there was perfume in the general atmosphere of the table wafting over and up into my nostrils, a scent she said Napoleon, pipsqueak conqueror of Europe, had concocted for one of his wives, Josephine. He had just two, one fewer than me. The arrogant son of a bitch once said, “I am the revolution.” Well, that evening the revolution of Bruno Kleinfeld had begun, and I knew it had to be carried through or I would live forever as a state divided.

I listened to her. I am not cynical when I say this is the first rule of seduction. There is no seduction without big listening ears. Call me Harry, she said. I called her Harry. I listened to her tell me about her two grown-up kids, one documentary filmmaker, one prose writer, and the grandchild who could do somersaults and had developed unusual passions for Buster Keaton and Peggy Lee, and about her dead husband, who had been half Thai, half English, the son of a diplomat, a man who had been at home everywhere and nowhere. He sounded like a smoothie to me — a lot of money and a lot of angles — the kind of guy who steals into a smoke-filled bar in one of those Hollywood movies from the forties, wearing a white dinner jacket as he scans the room with his foreigner’s eyes.

I couldn’t really get a handle on Harry, on who she was, that is. She was frank and forthright, but there was hesitation in her, too. She formed her sentences slowly, as if she were thinking about each word. She spoke at some length about Bosch, about how much she loved his demons and “mutations.” She loved Goya. She called him “a world apart.” “He was not afraid to look,” she said, “even though there are things that should not be seen.” Sometime around the second glass of wine, she lowered her voice as if she were afraid the couple at the next table would overhear her. There had been a little boy, she said, who lived under her bed in her family’s apartment on Riverside Drive. “He breathed fire.” Her exact words. He breathed fire. Harry did not say “imaginary boy” or “imaginary friend.” She placed her long hands on the tablecloth, leaned toward me, inhaled and exhaled. “I wanted to fly, you see, and breathe fire. Those were my dearest wishes, but it was forbidden, or I felt it was forbidden. It has taken me a very long time, a very long time to give myself permission to fly and breathe fire.”

I did not say I hoped she would breathe fire on me, although the hankering to say it was strong. I made some other crack, and she laughed. She had good teeth, Harry did, nice even white teeth, and a sonorous laugh, a big fat laugh that gave me amnesia, that wiped out years of my life in the rat hole, that made me feel light and free and, as I said to her, unburdened, unburdened because Harriet Burden’s laugh lifted LIU and the poem and the chipped linoleum right up and off of me. I don’t know why, but my pun on her name made her serious, and her lips quivered. I thought she might break down on the spot with the weepies and water her half-eaten chicken, so I swooped in. I swooped in with Thomas Traherne. Nothing could have been better than my old friend Tom, dead in 1674, an ecstatic versifier if there ever was one, a poet all but lost until 1896 when some anonymous but curious soul discovered a manuscript in a London bookstall. I had memorized Traherne’s poem “Wonder” years earlier. All at once, the third stanza popped into my head, and I read it straight off some sheet of paper inside my skull as the lady of my heart looked at me all atremble: