Siri Hustvedt - The Blazing World

And then one early evening in spring, I was taking a leak with two lines from the divine Emily in my head— This slow day moved along— / I heard its axles go —and from the window I saw Harry striding on the street below, looking thin, too thin, ten pounds gone, at least, maybe more. The un-Harry, I said to myself, not my Harry. And for the second time in the course of our romantic entanglement, I galloped down the stairs and into the street after her, but I didn’t hail her. I hastened after her in the cold air and trotted along the water. Like a private dick tailing a suspect, I held my distance at about thirty yards, but then I thought, Run after her. Go get her, man. Hadn’t I done it once before? I was about to yell her name when I saw Rune loping toward her from the opposite direction, and I stopped in my tracks.

As I watched the two of them, their figures stood out against the expanses of gray sky and gray water — and above them were halos of yellow light on the low clouds. A wind blew Harry’s trench coat up behind her and pushed around her hair. A pair of gulls flapped, flapped and sailed, flapped, flapped, flapped and sailed again high over their heads. The scene is vivid, a hard, clear picture in my mental space, even though in hindsight the memory has an unreal, dreamlike feeling. I watched Harry plead with her hands. She shook them in his face. He leaned toward her. He must have been talking to her, but they were too far away for me to hear anything. Then he opened his arms, palms up, and shrugged his indifference at her. I didn’t really need to hear them. Their bodies spoke for them. Harry stepped forward, gripped him by the shoulders, and pushed. He stumbled backward, danced to regain his balance, and, once upright, he wiggled his hips and shoulders, swishing like a fairy, but why? He was taunting her, but what was it all about? The man continued his effeminate gestures, mincing and prancing and limp-wristing her, and I realized they were more mixed up in each other than I had known. God Almighty, had they been lovers? I thought. She was more than twenty years older than Rune. Sick confusion in the general vicinity of my lungs and then a piercing anxiety. I began to trot toward them, my protective instinct rising by the second.

And then, as I neared them, I saw Harry ball up her fist and hit him in the face hard. He stumbled backward, his mouth open as he yelled in pain. I started to run toward them, but so did everybody else within shouting distance. When I reached them, I saw Rune with his hand to his mouth, blood pouring over his fingers. But Harry hadn’t finished. She threw herself at him again and punched him in the stomach. He cried out as he held his gut, but he recovered, grabbed her by the shoulders, and heaved her away from him. She lost her footing and sailed backward onto the ground. A woman wearing owl glasses and a red-and-black-checked jacket ran over to Harry and crouched beside her. I noticed that Harry’s coat was bloody, probably Rune’s blood. She saw me, her old lover come to witness the fracas, and looked up with a surprised face, but no anger, not a trace of anger. Two men had grabbed Rune by the arms to restrain him from further violence. He was saying, She attacked me, for Christ’s sake. She attacked me. This was in fact the God’s honest truth, but who is going to defend a man standing over an unarmed woman whom he has just thrown to the ground?

Rune avoided my eyes, and this pleased me. He knew that I knew. “Oh-the-poet” knew he, Rune, was a goddamned liar and thief. There were questions in that citizen huddle about whether to call the police, about whether to press charges, but it was determined that neither combatant wanted the law involved, and while the discussions went on, Rune fished out a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket and, cupping his hand around a lighter, carefully dragged in the smoke to avoid his fat, bloody lip, and looked casually around him. I’m going to leave now. This is absurd. She’s nuts. Anyone who saw her hit me knows she’s nuts.

And after the committee had all agreed to it, Rune left. He turned on his heels and strode down the walk beside the water.

Harry hadn’t moved. The owl woman gave her a kindly pat and, understanding that the emotional bomb had been defused, she and the other concerned folk who had intervened wandered off to their lives, a few of them turning to look at us to make sure the felled lady was in good hands.

Oh, Harry, I said.

She started to nod at me. Her chin moved mechanically up and down. Her mouth stretched into a grimace, and she squinted to shut out the tears, grabbed her head with her hands, and rocked back and forth. Oh, Bruno, she cried. I’m so lost.

And then I said the right thing for once. I said, That was a nice right hook, Harry.

I practiced, Bruno, she said. I practiced on the bag. And then she lifted up her swollen right hand to show me, and I saw the bruises forming already. The injured warrior slumped toward me, and I gathered her up, as the saying goes. I gathered up Harry in my arms, and we walked haltingly back to the lodge together, bandaged her hand, and celebrated our reunion.

Your body / has not become yours only nor left my body mine only. Capacious, he was, Whitman, and greedy, greedy for people. He wanted to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch people. He rolled around in their humanness. He sucked in the city and its crowds as tactile realities. We went to sleep that night in Harry’s big bed folded in each other, and before we slept, I thought of the bard sailing over the world as he surveyed his sleepers in the great democracy that is sleep. All of us creatures have to sleep.

After her first and what would be her last fistfight, Harry didn’t speak of Rune or the project or her resentments much anymore, not to me, anyway. I have been thrown back on myself, she liked to say. I have taken the Kierkegaardian position. The Kierkegaardian mingled with tragic queen. Harry quoted Margaret Cavendish regularly, that colorful lady philosopher, whose most fervent hope was that she would find readers after she was dead. The Duchess of Newcastle had dreamed of a glorious posthumous life when she would finally be appreciated. I had never heard of Cavendish before I met Harry, patriarchal dupe that I am, but Harry loved her. Dead in 1673, her work had been dismissed, ignored, or denigrated for more than three hundred years until she rose again and people began to take notice. Harry embraced the duchess as a battered and rejected sister striver in a man’s world.

Harry returned to her Margaret, her Blazing World Mother creature she had begun much earlier and had nearly finished, but which she had abandoned because this monster had never satisfied her. When I first saw the huge, grinning, naked, heated-up, pregnant mama with her hanging boobs squatting in the studio, she gave me a start. This was no sweet, dreaming, oversized odalisque like the one Harry made for that kid, Tish. This woman had worlds inside her. When you looked up and into her bald, see-through cranium, you saw little people, hoards of busy wax Lilliputians going about their business. They ran and jumped. They danced and sang. They sat at miniature desks facing computers, typewriters, or pages. When you looked closely, you could see they were making musical scores, drawings, mathematical formulas, poems, and stories. One dumpy old guy was writing Confessions of a Minor Poet . There were seven lascivious couples going at it upstairs in the female Gulliver’s head — men and women, men and men, women and women — a regular orgy. There was a bloody sword fight and a murderer with a gun, looking down at his victim’s corpse. There was a unicorn and a minotaur and a satyr and a fat angel woman with wings and lots of chubby babies in all colors. Downstairs — that is, from between the labial folds of her enormous vagina — the fertile matriarch popped out another city of little humanoids. Harry worked hard with her suspension wires in order to achieve the effect: Some of the teeny ones were suspended in midair between the giant doll’s birth canal and the ground. Others had already landed and were seen crawling, walking, running, or skipping away from their giant originator in several directions.