Harriet Burden Notebook O
September 23, 2003
The summer people are gone, and the island is chill and brown with patches of burning reds. The surf frightens me these days, and I keep my distance, staying close to where the beach meets the grasses that bow down in the hard wind. Today it made a noise that made me think of a great hoarse animal calling out to no one in particular. I am alone. I have lost Bruno now, too, lost him to my schemes and my rage and my failure. I wanted to bite the world bloody, but I have bitten myself, made my own poor tragedy of things.
And I feel even older alone. My belly is always bloated, even though I am thin. I eat alone, and the food doesn’t look as good as when he is with me. I have pains, vague abdominal aches that I wonder about. Sometimes at night they scare me, but in the morning I chide myself for hypochondria. My wrinkled face surprises me. I don’t know why. I know it is wrinkled. Knowing is not seeing. I have tried to work here, but I cannot. It is as if all the worlds in my head are dying now, my blazing worlds, which I have clung to with my whole being, are slowly being snuffed out. And I sit in front of the fire wrapped in blankets reading Paradise Lost again, slowly, slowly, taking in the dense language I know so well. This afternoon I arrived at Eve’s dreadful meal, the big turn in the old story. The flawed, stupid, vain woman has eaten the damned fruit. “Greedily she ingorg’d without restraint.” She has done it for knowledge, to know more, to be illuminated. How I understand it. Yes, light up my head. I will do anything to know, to know more. Adam is horrified, but he cannot leave her. “Flesh of flesh, / Bone of my bone, and from thy State / Mine shall never be parted, bliss or woe.” And it was like my own fat man speaking to me, and I cried on the old paperback edition I’ve had here in the house for all these years. No one has loved me better than Bruno, and yet, it cannot work between us.
I have become hard.
Harriet Burden Notebook D
Rune is inundated with my messages. He has agreed to see me. He wants me to stop “the harassment.” He refused to see me in Manhattan. He wouldn’t meet me in a restaurant. No, he wants to collide here in Red Hook in the open air where no art world types will see us, no tongues will wag. Fine, I said. Fine.
I have lost. Rune will never let go. He will never tell, and without him it is over. I can hold tight to Phinny’s words in Art Lights, to the Brickman piece, but I see how little people care. Somehow my story doesn’t interest them. I wanted to turn Rune back into a whining Ruina, to ruin him, to make him pay; but he owns the game now and makes the rules, if there are any rules anymore, if there ever were any rules. My hand is a swollen, purple mess. I hit him so hard. And I found Bruno. No, that’s a lie. Bruno found me. There he was, as if by magic, to pick me up off the ground. Today he made me chicken soup and watched my face closely as I spooned it into my mouth, and I made all the right sounds to please him.
October 18. I read it in the paper. Rune is dead.
He has made the last move, and he has done it in a contraption that steals from Beneath, and now he is sanctified. How the world loves the artist suicide, not old artists, of course, not old bags like me. No, they must be young or youngish. Thirty-eight is the perfect age to die if you want to cement your fame, to summon the throngs to feast on your beautiful corpse, to chew on your luminous legacy, made more poignant by the now-impossible future. Ah, Rune. Checkmate. And if he didn’t mean to do it? He would have gotten around to killing himself sooner or later. He wanted a beautiful death, didn’t he? And such a death must be planned. It don’t come natur’l. Celebrity is life in the third person. Ethan is right. Some people are better at living the third person than others.
But I sabotaged myself without knowing it, didn’t I? It was as if I had to follow the game to its end, to wind up in that room with Rune and the dead Felix to be threatened, slapped, and humiliated, to be turned back into a cowering, ashamed child who cannot speak up. I was pulled toward it, as if time were nothing, and the past had become both present and future, and the dead could walk again. They tramp through the furrows of your mind, Harry, in that rumpled wilderness of gray matter, the two men you wanted but couldn’t have, your father and your husband. It was not just love. That’s where you went wrong. You know that now. It wasn’t just about love and wanting to be loved. You were not that eternal plaintive female bleating over the ages, I love you, and I want you to love me, and I will wait for you, my love, with my hands folded and my head down. I am not that paragon of virtue, Penelope, waiting for Odysseus and turning away the suitors.
I am Odysseus.
But I found out too late.
I hate you, Father. I hate you, Felix. I hate you both for not seeing that truth, for not recognizing that I am the clever hero.
And Mother, you bent your head and you took his punishment. He shut you out and he shut you down. He did not speak to you. He acted as if you did not exist, because you wanted to speak.
And you, Harry, you bent your head and you took his punishment, and you cannot bear it, can you?
And didn’t you wait at home like Penelope, without any suitors, sadly, just two children? And were you not faithful? And were you not kind? And were you not long-suffering? So are you not Penelope? No, because she did not want to be Odysseus, at least as far as we know she didn’t, but who would want to be Penelope? You did not want to wait, and yet you nearly went mad waiting. And now your son, too, keeps his distance from you, as if you are contaminated. If he identifies with you, he is emasculated, such an old drama; my feminist son is terrified of maternal stench.
I am Odysseus, but I have been Penelope.
But how he loved you back in the day, little, intense, hypersensitive Ethan, whatever he says, whatever he has forgotten. You have that passionate story in your memory fields. And your daughter is with you still. You have Maisie. And you have Aven.
And Rune? He is the sign of your hatred, your envy, your fury, isn’t he?
Did he start it, Harry? Or did you? What did he want from you? Did he only want the pleasure of hurting you through Felix?
“He liked to watch.” That’s what Rune said, that Felix was a voyeur. Does it matter that he rubbed his cock to ecstasy while he looked at others humping on the floor in front of him? No. And does it matter that when you imagine it you feel sad? But why sad, Harry? Didn’t you enjoy tormenting Ruina in the game? Didn’t Rune know it filled you with sadistic joy? Isn’t that why he turned the tables on you? He knew that you played both parts. There’s the rub. And knowing is power. Elementary Freud, dear Watson. A child is being beaten.I
But I didn’t know about Felix. All I knew is that there were secrets and that some of the secrets had names. I wondered what was in his head when we grappled in bed. I wonder if it was Harriet Burden. Was it ever Harriet Burden, wife and helpmeet? Sure it was. In the beginning it was. Rune might have lied about Felix, but even if he were lying, it wouldn’t make much difference now. Rune became the sign of all the boys who studied their Quine and mastered their logic and smoked their pipes and looked at your father with worshipful eyes, the boy you might have been, Harry. But for a twist of fate in the womb, you might have pleased him and triumphed. And Rune became the sign of all the boys Felix showed and Felix loved and Felix made famous and Felix bought and Felix sold. That gets close to the heart of the matter, doesn’t it? What do you say, Dr. F.? Am I getting close to the heart of the matter? Rune, Mr. Third Person, Mr. Swagger, Mr. Glib — the one who counts, the one who wins. And isn’t it just that quality of knowing, of assurance, of entitlement that you detest, Harry, that you find so hard to imitate, the quality they all had? And did they not all condescend to you, Harry? Did they not regard you as an inferior, you who could out-think, out-work, out-do every single one of them?