The Blazing World (20 page)

It was true they didn’t want Harry the artist. I began to see that up close. She was old news, if she had ever been news at all. She was Felix Lord’s widow. It all worked against her, but then Harry scared them off. She knew too much, had read too much, was too tall, hated almost everything that was written about art, and she corrected people’s errors. Harry told me she never used to set people straight. For years she had sat by, silently listening to people mess up references and dates and artists’ names, but by then she had had it. She said she had been released by Dr. F., a figure I began to think was an invisible man behind Harry. Harry credited the invisible man with permission. She now permitted herself to say what she had suppressed earlier: “I think you mean so-and-so,” she would say, and people inevitably gave her that and-who-are-you? glance. Some of them fought back, telling her she was wrong—and then the battle started. Harry had stopped backing down.

But Harriet Burden’s status rose, anyway, not as an artist but as a player in the who’s-somebody-and-who’s-nobody game of New York City. She had hidden from “all that” since Felix Lord died, had shunned the whosits and whatsits, the dukes and duchesses of moolah, the muckety-mucks with acquired tastes. But now she was back in it, not as Felix Lord’s “hostess by marriage” (Harry’s phrase) but on her own. The whosits and whatsits liked Harry as a promoter, liked her as a rich champion of young, talented artists, and as a collector. (No one knew that her first “discovery,” Anton Tish, had absconded. They guessed he was hard at work on another show.) Harry played the part. She put on her own mask, and once it was on, she got better at the role, more confident. It suited her. In fact, she was more truthful. “I thought that article was complete rubbish,” she told a woman who had carefully marked her copy of
Art Assembly
with Post-its. And she started buying art, mostly by women. It’s brilliant, she said about a canvas by Margaret Bowland, and it’s a bargain.

“Hats, Harry,” I said to her one Sunday afternoon at the lodge.

“Hats?”

“That’s what you need.” I told her that she should always make her entrance with a hat. She groaned over this suggestion as too pretentious, too absurd, but then I bought her one, a taupe fedora, and she looked
wunderbar
, as Dieter likes to say, and so H.B.’s signature look was born. She came to like the headwear. “It covers up my unattractive mind,” she would say; “all those unpleasant ideas nobody wants to hear me talk about.”

But, you see, Harry was free to comment on her own work as if it belonged to me, and she knew just what to say. She wasn’t putting herself forward, after all. She was speaking up for P. Q. Eldridge, that “highly interesting” performance artist who had branched out into another medium. “He stages mysterious stories,” she would say, smiling, “visual elaborations of his work as a performer.” And she could push Ethan. “You should read the article about Phinny’s act in
The Neo-Situationist Bugle
—the cultural construction of race and gender and ambiguity as the ultimate subversion, fascinating.”

As time went on, we made more works, some of them real collaborations. We designed smaller rooms with itsy-bitsy figures and somewhat larger ones. None of them told clear stories. They were all as murky as dreams. I thought up one called
Guns and Cleavage
for a three-by-four-foot room. We used bits and pieces of images from kung fu, blaxploitation, and old Westerns. We added some shots from Japanese pink movies, and Russ Meyer stills to cover the walls, floor, and ceiling. White or black or yellow, tits, ass, and firearms fuel the movies. BANG, BANG, STAB, SLASH, BOOM, CRASH. I cut down the pictures to their essences—six-shooters blazing, automatic weapons cradled like babies in male arms with burgeoning biceps, Elizabeth Taylor’s cleavage in
Cleopatra
, but also the built-up boobs or buttocks of starlets. Some of the fragments were cut so small they became abstract. Lying on the floor of this sex-and-violence burlesque are two little brown kids in pajamas with feet, both protectively holding their crotches. (Made me think of me and Letty.)

The Bandage House
was another collaboration. We took a small, crooked house with miserable pieces of furniture in it that Harry had built and covered it with torn white gauze, inside and out, but through the material you can see on the walls and floors and the roof discolorations and marks that make you think of bruises, scrapes, wounds, and scars. At first we had some
farblondzhet
little folks inside it, but we took them out. It had to be empty.

Countless cocktail parties and openings later, we landed a show at the Alex Begley Gallery. When
The Suffocation Rooms
were shown, they were read through me—P. Q. Eldridge was exploring his identity in his art. White boys, the Anton Tishes of the world, have no need to explore their identities, of course. What is there to explore? They are the neutral universal entity, the unhyphenated humans. I was pretty much all hyphen.

There was a further reading, however. The show was mounted the spring after New York was attacked, and the little mutant that crawled out of the box had the haunting look of a damaged survivor or a new being born in the wreckage. It didn’t matter that the work had been finished well before 9/11. The increasing heat in the rooms contributed to the interpretation; the last, hot room felt ominous. At the same time, my debut was an insignificant casualty of the falling towers. There were a few articles, mostly good notices, but the show was probably even more marginal than it might have been. By the time the rooms were truly recognized, it was too late for Harry.

But back then, she watched it all. She told me that Anton had called her his fairy godmother, and she was mine, too, I suppose. She stood in the corner wearing a hat and watched the spectacle she had made unfold before her. A white, half-Jewish woman became a black, gay, male artist of some small notice, causing a little stir among sophisticated black and/or gay or both people, but white heterosexual people, too. Without the latter it’s back to a ghetto, an art ghetto, but a ghetto nevertheless. I did not give up my job as H/Lester, but I stopped working five days a week and cut down to three. The show’s audience had grown because art world types had started to drift in to see the fighting, dancing, dueling duo. It’s all a vanity fair.

No one saw it then, but Harry and I recorded our story in full on the wallpaper of
The Suffocation Rooms
. We mixed in the narrative of P.Q. as Harry’s mask with automatic writing, scribbles, doodles, and some palimpsest effects—writing over what we had written—but it’s all there. Unread for years.
Phineas Q. Eldridge is really Harriet Burden
was written on the walls in several places. P.Q.E. = H.B. Harry described the phenomenon as “inattentional blindness.” She read a lot of science papers, but what it meant was simple: People don’t see things that are right in front of their eyes unless they pay attention to them. That’s how magic works—sleight-of-hand tricks, for example. Harry was ready to tell the world, but nobody was ready for her confession.

One night I heard her crying on Bruno. They were in her bedroom, but her sobs were loud. Then came his hush-hush, it’s-okay voice. Bruno didn’t like the experiment at all. They had verbal knockdowns over it. But I disagreed. I wasn’t an art expert then, and I’m not one now, but I defend our act, if that’s what you want to call it. To be really seen, Harry had to be invisible. It’s Harry crawling out of that box—thin-skinned, part girl/part boy little Harriet-Harry. I knew that. It’s a self-portrait.

Why some artworks create such a big fuss is a conundrum. First the idea spreads like a cold and then people spend money on it. Mine-is-bigger-than-yours goes a long way among collectors in that world, maybe in every world. I never knew Rune—that one-name-only artist—who agreed to be Harry’s third pseudonym. I first saw the art world glamour-puss at the Reim Gallery. I think that’s where Harry first ran into him, too, although I’ve heard several versions of their first meeting, and I could be wrong. I’d read about him on Page Six in the
Post
, knew he had made it big, but the only works I’d seen were the crosses. He churned out one after another. They resembled the Red Cross sign but were multicolored in flat acrylic. A yellow one had sold for a mint because he had made only one. You can say whatever you want about something so simple, build it up or tear it down, but Rune promoted the Christian symbol as pop icon, as another hot commodity on the art market. The congregants back home at Calvary Pentecostal might have cried blasphemy, but it’s unlikely they’ll ever hear about Rune’s paintings. Fame is a relative term.

Rune had
it
. Whatever it is, it’s something you can feel in a room, an animal verve, a slink with some sex in it, but it wasn’t personal sex. He was not seducing anyone. He was seducing everyone, and there’s a big difference. I am a student of personal presentation, and it is wildly important to appear careless if not indifferent to the opinions of other people. Even a hint of desperation is ugly, and we must avoid it at all costs. Misery sucks up energy in the person who feels it and in all those who are forced to look at it, and then we’re all stuck in the mud. Desire functions best when it’s directed at a beautiful blank—the boys and girls into whom we toss all our pathetic hopes for happiness. In many ways, Rune was a perfect third candidate for Harry. He arrived with ready-made aura, that mysterious quality that infects our eyes so we can’t tell what we’re looking at anymore. Is the emperor naked or am I a fool? Some hated Rune’s work and others loved it, but no one disputed his power to sway. I don’t know how Harry talked him into becoming a front. He had all the markers of success, a palace-size apartment on Greenwich Street, a house in the Hamptons, and legions of women running marathons after him. Maybe he was bored. Maybe something happened to him after September 11 that made him want what Harry had—her passion, her seriousness, her capacity for joy. I don’t know.

I have a clear memory of Harry and Rune, heads together in the gallery, talking. They were about the same height. I studied him from behind—short blond hair, big shoulders and upper back, narrow hips and a small, hard, slightly flat posterior, long legs in jeans, black boots with heels. And when I moved around to see his face, I noticed he had some wrinkles around his eyes, not so young anymore, but handsome, photogenic. He had a beautiful young woman with him. The two of them looked more like movie stars than movie stars look when you actually see them. She had that slick shine to her that comes from knowing everybody’s looking at you all the time, the pose held for a camera that isn’t there.

What had they talked about? In the cab on the way back to the lodge, Harry said their big subject had been Bill Wechsler. Harry loved Wechsler’s work. She counted him as an influence, although he was born after her. He had died suddenly a few months earlier. I remember she held my hand in the taxi and kissed it several times in a fit of sudden affection, saying, “Dear, dear Phinny.” Then, after we got home, we lounged about with a cognac, getting tipsy. Harry confided she found Rune’s crosses boring, but she liked some of his earlier works, the plastic-surgery screens, which were genuinely creepy. Maybe she’d buy one—a good investment. If it didn’t hold up, she could always turn around and sell it to some hungry collector eager for the name.

After bussing me in the taxi, Harry turned prickly, irritable, and sour. She had drunk too much, and I could feel the self-pity mounting as she rolled off the names of women artists suppressed, dismissed, or forgotten. She jumped up from the sofa and stomped back and forth across the room. Artemisia Gentileschi, treated with contempt by posterity, her best work attributed to her father. Judith Leyster, admired in her day, then erased. Her work handed over to Frans Hals. Camille Claudel’s reputation swallowed whole by Rodin’s. Dora Maar’s big mistake: She screwed Picasso, a fact that had obliterated her brilliant Surrealist photographs. Fathers, teachers, and lovers
suffocate
women’s reputations. These are three I remember. Harry had an endless supply. “With women,” Harry said, “it’s always personal, love and muck, whom they fuck.” And a favorite theme of Harry’s, women treated like children by paternal critics, who refer to them by their first names: Artemisia, Judith, Camille, Dora.

I crossed my legs, looked askance at Harry, and began to whistle. It was not the first time I had taken this approach. “I am not the enemy,” I said. “Remember me, Mr. Feminist Phineas Q., your friend and ally, black gay man or gay black man with
slave
ancestors, hence original name, Whittier? You may recall that black people were both feminized and infantilized by racism, dark bodies and dark continents, honey child. Seventy-year-old men were called
boys
by twenty-year-old white
ladies
.”

Harry sat down. Whistling, along with a few caustic verbal darts, usually brought her up short. She gave me that oh-Phinny-I’ve-gotten-carried-away-and-am-embarrassed-but-still-fiercely-attached-to-my-opinion look. Much later, I looked back at the evening and saw further ironies. If Harry knew that art history had steadily sunk the reputations of women artists by assigning their work to the dad, the husband, or the mentor, then she should have known that borrowing a big name like Rune might sting her in the end. And yet, what Harry took for granted was that she moved as a collector in circles where money and celebrity mingled, white circles with the rare black and brown face. I know because I had been that face.

Rune was smart, and he was gifted, but I doubt anyone can actually separate talent from reputation when it comes down to it. Celebrity works its own miracle, and after a while it lights up the art. I am curious about the man’s death, but I suspect he was one of those people who could never feel enough, and as time went on he had to push himself to further extremes to get any kind of a rush from life. I don’t really know what happened between him and Harry. I know she cared about him. I know he fascinated her. But I had fallen for Marcelo and moved away by the time it went wrong. All the gossip, all the lying and posturing billowing up like smoke around the whole story, have made me bilious. There was plenty of pain to go around.