Siri Hustvedt - The Blazing World

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.