Siri Hustvedt - The Blazing World

“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.