Siri Hustvedt - The Blazing World

For years, Harry said, Felix had interrupted her mid-sentence, and she would go silent. That’s just how it was. Felix had always said that he admired and supported her work, but he had flown here and there for his own work, and he had called to say he’d be late or had changed his flight, and Harry had stayed home with Maisie and Ethan. Yes, yes, yes, she said, she had had help, all she wanted, but you can’t farm out your children’s souls to others. And although Maisie had been a relatively easy child, Ethan had been difficult, hypersensitive and prone to explosions. His voracious needs had sometimes swallowed her whole. He had grown up all right, she said. He had become a strong, functioning person, but what if she hadn’t sat up with him at night, holding his hand, singing the odd, repetitive Philip Glass — like songs she had discovered were the only ones that soothed him. Harry sang a few bars under her breath: Bleep, bang, rum, rum, rum. Drum, drum, drum. Thrum, thrum, thrum . And the guilt, guilt, guilt , she said wryly to me, the guilt, guilt, guilt that she was to blame for his problems. I knew most of this, but I recognized that Harry needed to tell me, needed to explain. And, she said, she had never felt the money belonged to her. She hadn’t made it. Felix had started out with money and made much more. Over the years, she’d sold a few pieces of her art, nothing more. And the exhibitions she had had. Harry’s lips trembled. They were ignored or trashed.

I told her this wasn’t actually true. There had been some good reviews. There had. I remembered.

Harry’s face was a reproof. Money is power, she said . Men with money. Men with money make the art world go round. Men with money decide who wins and who loses, what’s good and what’s bad.

I offered the comment that this was changing, slowly perhaps, but changing nevertheless; that more and more women were getting their due. I had just read something about it…

Harry’s expression turned bitter. Even the most famous woman artist is a bargain compared to the most famous man — dirt cheap in comparison. Look at the divine Louise Bourgeois. What does that tell you? Harry’s voice cracked . Money talks. It tells you about what is valued, what matters. It sure as hell isn’t women.

She had all the answers. I didn’t reply. I looked down at the tablecloth and wondered what time it was, but I was too alert to Harry’s feelings to look at my watch. Maybe Harry had an inkling of what I was thinking, because she apologized to me. She said that she was selfish and obsessed and carried away and that she loved me. She asked me about Ray’s health, and I told her he was doing well, still bicycling in the park three times a week with his doctor’s approval, and he seemed sanguine about his retirement from NYU in the spring. He had hated the idea of forced retirement, but now his whole attitude had changed. She even asked me about Otto, and I said our nutty pooch had turned twelve and had to take both an antidepressant and an anti-inflammatory drug for arthritis. Harry smiled. We’re all getting old, she said, old and older .

I nodded. We talked about Maisie’s film Body Weather , about the psychotherapist who was seeing the Barometer and about the antipsychotics the man refused to take. I thought they might help him. Harry did not. Before we parted, Harry brought up Felix again, this time his love life, or rather the part of it that did not include her. Felix’s bisexuality has now become a public fact. The book The Days of the Felix Lord Gallery , which was published only a few months ago (in which the author, James Moore, treats Harry’s work with great respect and seriousness, I am happy to say), discussed the subject openly. A number of his lovers stepped into the open to talk about him, so however secret his adventures may have been while he was alive, they are not secret anymore. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that Felix’s sex life remains a mystery in the sense that the inside story cannot really be known. If one gains anything over the years working as I do, it is an overwhelming sympathy for the variations of human desire. Sexual arousal is surely not under our control, although acting upon it may be. And the notion that we live in an age of sexual freedom is a half-truth. I have had many patients whose shame and misery about their sexual thoughts has made them ill. And it can take a long time to discover the forces that lie beneath a particular fantasy, whether the desire is for boys or girls or older men or women, the thin or the obese, whether it involves tenderness or cruelty, or whether it is aided by all manner of paraphernalia, standard or idiosyncratic. Is it not anathema in our culture to express even a hint of compassion for the man with pedophilic yearnings, or to acknowledge the simple truth that there are sexual encounters between adults and children that do not leave lasting scars on the latter?

I mention this because intolerance about sexual life is everywhere. Not long ago, a woman whom I know only a little made a coarse comment about Harry after she had read the book about Felix. “Any woman who would put up with that shit,” she said to me, “had to have been a rank fool.” I told her that Harry had been “a dear friend of mine” and that she had been “no fool.” It was an awkward moment, but the woman said nothing more about it.

At first, I didn’t know where Harry was going. She began the next turn in our conversation by saying that sometimes when Felix had been out very late at night, at an opening or a dinner with collectors she had not attended, she would hear him when he came home. He was always very careful not to make much noise, but she would hear his light footsteps in the hall anyway. She explained that when their children were young, she would wake to a sigh or a squeak or a cough and lie in bed listening to hear if that small sound would be followed by a wail or a call for her. There had been two parallel worlds at the time, she said, of sleep and of wakefulness, each held in perfect balance with the other. It was as if she had lived in both states at once, and so the creak of the door opening, followed by her husband’s steps, never failed to rouse her. She said that on some nights he would come directly in to her, pull open the bed and crawl inside with her, always facing away from her. Then she would pull him close to her and stroke his back, which he liked. But on other nights, particularly the ones when he returned in the wee morning hours, she would hear him undress in the bathroom and step into the shower. And Harry would lie awake listening to the noise of the rushing water and say to herself, He is washing off the others .

Harry did not confront him. She said she had simply known what those nocturnal ablutions meant. He had wanted to keep his worlds separate. He had cleaned off one to enter the other. And, she confided, she had pitied him. I would lie there, Rachel, and think to myself, Poor Felix. What if it were me? What if I had desires that overwhelmed me? How would I want to be treated? Would I want meanness and rejection?

I said I thought sainthood usually had a price.

Harry agreed with me. She said she had paid dearly. He had hurt her, and she had pushed down her rage at him, but a part of her couldn’t help feeling sorry for him anyway. That’s why I need the cold mask, you see. Harry looked at me so earnestly and in such a big-eyed, childlike way, I found her face comic.

Cold mask? I asked her.

Yes, she answered me, a cold, hard, indifferent mask, an imperious persona that will rise up and smash the stupids. He comes out when I’m with Rune . That’s why she was interested in multiple personalities, because she thought plurality was human, she explained. She didn’t get dizzy, black out, or lose people inside her. She knew perfectly well that she was Harry, but she had discovered new forms of her self, forms she said that most men take for granted, forms of resistance to others. Why do you suppose, she said, that over ninety percent of all the reported cases of multiple personality have been women? Bend and sway, Harry said triumphantly. Bend and sway. The pull of the other. Girls learn, she said. Girls learn to read power, to make their way, to play the game, to be nice .