We all recovered, but before I left in a car service with Aven, my mother looked me in the eyes. It was a severe look, not cold but strict, the way she sometimes looked at me when I was small and had lied or cheated or hit Ethan.
I remember it because I felt guilty, although I wasn’t sure why. She closed her eyes, then she opened them, and in a calm low voice said, “I’m sorry you were unsettled, Maisie, but I’m not sorry I made him. There are more dreams, I’m afraid, and they must out.” She smiled sadly and escorted us down to the waiting car.
I can still see her as she turned away from us. I wish I had filmed her then. It’s beautiful out there by the water with the view of the Statue of Liberty, but it was desolate, too, bleaker then than it is now, and the sight of my mother striding away from us toward the brick building under a big cloudy sky made me feel that I was losing her. I used to feel that way after I said goodbye to her at my summer camp. And then — it was just a minor thing — I noticed that she was letting her hair grow, and it looked like a small wild bush on top of her head.
Harriet Burden Notebook C
Where did they come from? The penis with wings, his penis, the empty suit jackets and pants aloft and running with Felix paraphernalia — reading glasses, cologne, gleaming nail file (file X), a blank canvas (hope) — the giant Felix squashed into one of my rooms like Alice, the tiny Felixes lined up in a row, clad in various outfits, husband dolls, I called them. Somehow my father began to come in, too. The book man sleeping on a page of Spinoza, skipping over Leibniz (he loved Leibniz), a small daddy Luftmensch hovering just above a flight of stairs, words inscribed all over his two-piece suit. The elusive one, my elusive ones, began to mingle in the drawings and the sculptures, their faces and their clothes, mergings of desire, maddening beloveds mixed up in Harry’s mind. And anger, too, at their power over me. That’s why they grew and shrank.
I didn’t know how to make my mother. That would come later. There was some problem rendering a person I had once been inside.
I did not have to chase her.
I chased the men howling Look at me!
Knowledge.I Husserl’s student Edith Stein is the best philosopher on the subject, and she lived it, lived her words.II Philosophy is hard to picture. I began to wonder if I could represent empathy, for example, build an empathy box. I doodled possible forms for the inside. I made notes. I hummed. I listened to the St. Matthew Passion a lot. I understood that my freedom had arrived. There was nothing and no one in my way except the burden of Burden herself. The wide-open future, the great yawn of absence, made me dizzy, anxious, and, occasionally, high, as if I had doped myself, but I hadn’t. I was the ruler of my own little Brooklyn fiefdom, a rich widow woman, long past babies and toddlers and teenagers, and my brain was fat with ideas.
But then came the loneliness at night, the restless wanting that reminded me of my years alone in my first apartment in the city when I was at Cooper Union. I was hurled back to my young self — the solitary girl artist with vague cravings for a future that somehow involved both fame and love. I began to understand that the feelings I had assigned to my youth were not really about that time of life. The agitation I felt after a long day of work was the same disquiet I had felt as a person who had barely emerged from childhood. I pined for a Someone, a potential personage to fill up the remaining hours. Felix, old friend and interlocutor, delicate, evasive, acerbic, philandering, kind Felix was gone. You’ve driven me to my wits’ end! (I had been a sometime screamer.) But that end had never been reached. My wits had stayed, and so had his, and we had repaired the damage to them regularly. There was no fixing anymore. No fixing. No Felix. I struggled to comprehend the void, and the fact that I had begun to register it as real took the form of that empty other being, a lacuna, a hole in the mind, but it was not the hole named Felix.
And so I’d walk over to Sunny’s Bar, where I’d sit and look at the people and listen to them talk, a balm of voices. Sometimes there was music. Once I heard a poetry reading and afterward talked to the poet, who had big eyes and red lipstick, much younger even than Ethan, and, although I found her poems terrible, I rather liked her. She called herself April Rain, an idea I supposed had come to her while writing. The girl had a large duffel bag with a gaping zipper, and she had tied a couple of sweaters and a hat on to it, and when she picked up the load and began to walk, I told her she looked like an immigrant staggering off the pier in 1867, and she explained to me that she was sleeping on a friend’s sofa because she was “between places,” and I took her home.
April Rain, little white girl with bird tattoos on her lower arms and quantities of shattered glass in her poems that occasionally caused bleeding, was my first artist in residence. She didn’t stay more than a week. One night she found a disheveled beau at Sunny’s and never returned, but while she lasted, I liked having her around, and her presence staved off the jostling pains of evening. While looking at Ms. Rain’s soft pale face and plump cheeks as we ate our lentils or roasted vegetables (she was vegetarian) and chatted about Hildegard of Bingen or Christopher Smart, I forgot what I looked like. I forgot that I had wrinkles, breasts that needed a mighty brassiere to hold them up, and a middle-aged gut that protruded like a melon. This amnesia is our phenomenology of the everyday — we don’t see ourselves — and what we see becomes us while we’re looking at it. One night after saying good night to my twenty-two-year-old bardess, I looked in the mirror before bed, surprised myself with my own face, and burst into tears. Felix loved this aging mug, I thought. He praised it and stroked it. There’s no one to love it now.
It may have been self-pity — the sense that I had grown too ugly to warm up any man’s bed — that lay behind the idea that some of my constructed beings needed to have a bit of heat. My mother had had a penchant for electric mattress pads that toasted her through the night; the problem, as she explained it, was her circulation and ossified feet. My blood doesn’t run; it crawls, and it seems never to arrive at my toes. My parents’ pad had two settings, one for each side of the bed. She would set hers on six and make sure my father’s side was turned off so he didn’t cook in his sleep. After he died, she raised her level to ten, but she left his side cold, a memorial chill. No extra technology was required for my carcasses, although I fiddled with the wiring before I was truly happy with it. I began with a life-size effigy of Felix; it was an idea of him, not a likeness, his slender stuffed form covered with material I painted in blues and greens with a little yellow and dabs of red, man as canvas, but I added short white hair on the top of his head. When I plugged him in, his soft body ran a fever.
The pleasure this gave me was ludicrous. I couldn’t say then why the hot creature filled me with joy, but it did. I touched his colored sides gingerly to feel his warmth. I put my arms around him. I sat him next to me on the sofa. I called him my transitional object. Aven adored him. Ethan hated him. Maisie tolerated him. Rachel was both amused by and serious about him and the others. She wanted me to try for a gallery again, to go out like Willie Loman and hawk my wares and get attention, attention. But hadn’t they given their verdict over and over again? No one wanted Mrs. Lord’s handicrafts and dollies. Who was I, St. Sebastian?