Siri Hustvedt - The Blazing World

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.