Siri Hustvedt - The Blazing World

I gaped at him and said, Why didn’t you tell me you knew Felix?

Felix for happiness, he said, your Felix, your happiness.

Harry, you sat across from Rune and your face had fallen. You don’t know what your face looked like, but you know you couldn’t disguise the hurt.

It has nothing to do with you, my love, Felix said. It has nothing to do with you.

What are you doing here, Harriet?

You should not be here.

But why didn’t you tell me you knew Felix? Why didn’t you tell me you knew Felix?

Does it matter? Does it matter that we were close, Felix and I? he said. He talked about you a lot, you know. He thought you were brilliant. He admired you.

This is part of the game, I said. Isn’t it?

And he said it was the game, more of the game, and he took a key out of his pocket. He held it up. It hasn’t opened a door for years. It’s just a souvenir.

It was cruel. He was cruel.

And what did you do, Harry? You put your hand over your mouth to hide what was happening to it, and you stared at the floor. Is that correct? Yes, you remember holding your mouth with your hand, so he would not see your emotion. What did you feel? Disbelief? No, not that, really. The cut of betrayal, old and new. And then you lowered your hands. Your face had gone still. Yes, you could feel its stillness.

I attract you, don’t I? he said to me. He stood up. I stayed in my chair, and he put his hand on my neck. I excite you, don’t I? I shook my head no.

No, I said aloud, no.

Should I play Felix? We could play Richard and Felix, don’t you think that would be fun? Or we could play Rune and Felix. You could be me.

I did not look at him. I would not look at him.

You do know what Felix liked, don’t you? You do know what gave him happiness, don’t you? Come on, you must know.

I did not speak.

It’s so simple, he said, so, so simple. He liked to watch.

And my head had nothing inside it.

How shall we do it? he said. Maybe you would rather be Ruina? Felix watching Richard and Ruina could be fun, or Rune and Ruina, or Rune and Richard. We could pretend he’s watching. Your happiness, your Felix. Did Felix know about you, Harry? Did he know your secret? You are Ruina, aren’t you, Harry? I was playing you, a repugnant, sniveling, insecure little cunt.

These are the words I remember. I will remember them as long as I live. They will be my scars.

I sat in silence, as still as a stone. Harry, the stone. He talked about how well it had gone, Beneath , how much better than he had expected. He was surprised by its success, really surprised, and he moved his hands to my shoulders and gripped them hard. He said, But then, really , think what would have happened if your name had been on it? You are right, Harry. It would have been nothing.

And still you sat there while he pressed his hands into your shoulders, and you did not throw them off or make a move to stop him. You did not scream or hit him. And when he moved his hands to your throat and squeezed gently and said he was just playing around, where was your rage then, Harry? What was wrong with you, Harry? He said strangling can be exciting, orgasmic, as long as you don’t go too far.

Were you afraid, Harry?

Yes.

And then he let go of your neck, but you did not move then either. Did you?

No.

And then he slapped you, hard. And did you move?

No.

You were like a child frozen on a stool in the corner, a child who had been punished for speaking out of turn, for not raising her hand in class. A silent child made of stone.

And Rune said he was going to keep the work as his own. It’s mine now. It’s disguise and more disguise, Harry, he said. You lift up one mask and you find another. Rune, Harry, then Rune again. I win.

What did those words mean?

And then he said, People know, people know about your illness.

My illness? I repeated.

Your mental breakdown.

And I thought, my breakdown? Did I have a mental breakdown? Was that a mental breakdown I had after Felix died? Yes, probably. I had told Rune about the throwing up, about Felix, about Dr. F.

I became conscious of my swallowing. I had to swallow loudly. I couldn’t remember how to swallow quietly anymore.

Then the stone child stood up on its stiff stone legs, leaned over, and picked up the purse that belonged to the happy woman who had come through the door earlier. How many minutes earlier?

The feet mechanical go roundI

She found the jeep on Hudson Street. The world outside looked jittery to her. She looked into the windows of Bubby’s and saw people eating, forks in motion, up and down. She saw mouths chewing, a hand curling around an amber beer on a table. She saw another mouth open in a laugh and, below it, a chin bobbed, above it, eyes squinted. But her motion was not theirs; her rhythm was not theirs. It had never been theirs, had it? No, she lived in another time, another tempo. She drove to Red Hook, whoever she was, and she lay down on the floor of her studio. The Barometer brought her a drawing of a fallen angel with huge veined wings. He said, You look dead, Harry. She said, I feel dead. And he said, That’s okay. Don’t worry. It happens to all of us sometimes, and later, hours later, she called Bruno, and when he came, she told him some of the story, but not everything. She had to hide her shame, cover the burns that would become scars. She could not tell him about Ruina, that unhappy child who had turned to stone and then walked into the street with her head down.

I. Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson , 372. The line is a quotation from the poem that begins, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—”

Just a week ago, I found one of my mother’s notebooks hidden behind a row of books in the small building on Nantucket we called “the children’s house” because Ethan and I slept there when we were little. Mother has been dead for eight years already, but many more years might have passed without the notebook coming to light. Ethan and I had decided to sell the Nantucket house, and we were there alone, sifting through things and deciding what to save and what to give away, and we laughed a lot and remembered finding the dead gull on the beach and pretending the green stones we found were magic, and I swam every day, and Ethan didn’t, because he’s hydrophobic and can now admit it, poor guy. He used to go in the water when we were kids, and he learned how to swim, but I think he was always afraid of drowning, and now he doesn’t have to pretend he likes swimming anymore. The plain gray notebook was stuffed behind Treasure Island and Pippi Longstocking , and I instantly recognized my mother’s extravagant handwriting with its big loops, “Notebook O. The Fifth Circle.” She labeled the dozens of notebooks she kept with letters. I had spent years going through her notebooks for The Natural Mask , which is finally finished. After she died, we found hundreds and hundreds of pages of her writings that filled one notebook after another. Together they make a veritable tome.

I told Ethan I would read the notebook first and then give it to him. It’s funny, I would never have dared to read it when Mother was alive, but the dead lose their privacy, or much of it. The controversy about Mother and Rune and Maskings has not gone away, although those of us who were close to Mother have a pretty good idea of what the truth is because we believe what she wrote. After I had read the notebook, I handed it to Ethan and went for a walk down Squam Road, the old road I knew so well, feeling bruised and churned up. I suppose I was trying to fit together my discontinuous mothers into one person, and it wasn’t easy. I had to fit Father’s double life in, too, and that hurt. The game with the masks Mother and Rune played on Nantucket would be turned into the dances in Beneath , and it seems to me that the man Richard Brickman and the girl Ruina represented two warring sides of my mother. We all have weak parts of ourselves, and we all have dominating, cruel parts, too, but I think they are usually more mixed together than they were in my mother. Her entry about her visit to Rune and the tape he showed her made me sick. I had glimpsed a sadistic side of Rune when he taunted me with a key at the opening for The Suffocation Rooms . I have asked myself what Mother wanted, what she hoped for. It is so tiring, so crazy, so humiliating, this world of winning and losing and playing the game, but she wanted to be part of it somehow, and Rune knew how to get to her, where to aim the knife. To be honest, I had an urge to suppress that entry and others, too, to rip them out of the notebook and burn the pages, but that would have been stupid. As I walked under a hot sun on the dusty road past the familiar mailboxes, I kept seeing a picture of my mother, not as a grown-up but as the child in her simile: You were like a child frozen on a stool in the corner. That’s the mental image I still have when I think of that awful meeting between Mother and Rune: my tall, strong, passionate mother as a silent little girl, a girl who had been turned to stone.