The Blazing World (28 page)

I had no sense that the two were collaborators. It was obvious that Rune was calling the shots. I asked him what her problem was, and he said she was overly sensitive, a bit unstable, but a friend. I would like to note here that he defended her: “People don’t understand Harry, but she’s highly intelligent. She’s stuck on her own view, that’s all. I admire her for it.”

After Harriet left, Rune and I strayed onto the meanings of money, that eternal American subject. He had never seen real money before he came to New York. His hometown, Clinton, Iowa, had rolled in the glories of lumber riches in the second half of the nineteenth century, but when the forests were depleted around 1900, the wealth died with the trees. He had grown up with the moldering mansions and ragged parks left by long-dead millionaires, but in New York City those riches had been reborn in the body of Rena Dewitt. “Her soul was made of money,” he said. My own initiation had come at Yale, where I witnessed firsthand the casual assumptions of class, its ease and smugness, the lawns and paintings and town houses that lurked behind the friendly but distant smile. Of course we need the rich. We always have: to ogle and envy and imitate. They are our spectacle and our joy because in the head of every American lies the thought
That could be me
. (
That could be I
, grammatically correct though it is, does not lurk within our collective heart, not anymore.) The rich constitute our mythos, after all, our fairy tale, our hymn to success: the self-made man, the robber baron, dog-eat-dog, rugged individualism, nice guys finish last, carry your own gun and ride in your own limousine, long-legged babes with enhanced boobs on either side of you as you drive to the premiere and exit the car, flashbulbs exploding around you. There is still old money around, quiet and hidden and stealthy, but it has no grip on the public imagination as it once did. The social register, the 400, the debuts—still around, but there are fewer and fewer Philadelphia stories told in our world of Twitter and Facebook.

Rune and Rena—a gleaming pair. “Rune, the Rube,” he joked, “learned fast.” He learned because in the United States there is still a teeny-weeny bit of truth in the myth. Millionaire hairdressers hobnob with heiresses. Cowboy traders, suddenly flush, saunter through the doors of the Metropolitan Museum for a gala. The actress, once the kept paramour of Mr. Old Money slumming backstage, is now royalty in her own right. The newly minted artist buys up lofts and houses right and left. I have seen it all. Believe me. They’re up. They’re down. They soar and they crash. I am nobody’s conscience, but I am the man who looks on at the fiascos and the greed and the pills and the booze and the bouts in rehab. And I still have a job. I am still in my comfortable apartment, and I am invited to dinner a couple of times a week with people who count. I own two tuxedos. No one remembers the Crawler, but the techniques I used then are still good, and I have what cannot be faked: wit. It is a commodity in short supply.

The art of conversation has been dwindling steadily until there is nearly no art left, but I do my best to resurrect it when I can. And I understand the power of the compliment, which must always seize upon a truth. I told Rune that day that he was fascinatingly elusive, that he held my interest not only because I admired his work but because he embodied contradictions I felt in myself. I am continually torn between admiration and contempt for the circus of vanity and stupidity I witness every day and on which I dutifully report. I admire the ruthless vigor of the climbers, but I often bemoan their lack of style. I feel the pull to the future, the revolution of the digital age, but I long for the literate niceties of the past, for a touch of romance and courtesy.

He snorted at my comment, but then he made a long, rambling, excited confession of sorts, which I taped. I wasn’t going to use it. I just pushed the button through my jacket pocket and, even though the sound wasn’t perfect, I got a lot of it. He had always wanted to get out of Clinton, and he attributed this desire to escape to his mother. Not surprisingly, when one examined the son, the mother had been a beauty, a homecoming queen and then Miss Iowa Dairy Farm. Yes, even in Rune’s not very distant youth, such traditions continued in the Midwest. The woman had nurtured her own Bovary pipe dreams focused chiefly on Chicago, which came to naught. She had loved Motown music and used to dance wildly to the Supremes, bumping, grinding, and panting with her two children as all three laughed until their sides hurt in the living room, where she kept the framed photographs of the homecoming court—she at center smiling beside the king—as well as several eleven-by-thirteen glossies of herself in full Miss Dairy Farm regalia with a ribbon that crossed her chest and a golden crown on her head. “That was her glamour, her moment,” he said, “everyone staring at her.” She never let go of the moment, apparently, to her husband’s annoyance. She told the stories of her triumph again and again. “My poor mother,” Rune said. “She used to dress up for nobody and sashay around the house. Now I think she was crazy, nuts, certifiable.” And then there were the days when she didn’t get out of bed. She’d lie inert in her nightgown, staring at the ceiling, a glass of vodka beside her, disguised as a Coke. “Or she’d cry.” Brother and sister would try to rouse the listless parent, but nothing worked.

No, it was not a charming family portrait. The woman killed herself with a lethal combination of sleeping pills and alcohol. It was probably intentional, but Rune didn’t talk about her actual death, how exactly it had happened, and I didn’t ask. He beat his thighs as if they were two bongo drums through most of his tale, his eyes not on me but on the lamp beside his chair. At some point, he wandered onto the story of the cat, and he stopped drumming. He had been eight at the time.

Mrs. Sharon Larsen, an orphan of Nordic stock—hence the names of her two progeny—had been feeding a feral or near-feral cat against her husband’s wishes, a scraggy tabby, who came around for food late in the afternoon. After a while, the cat settled into the household, but the three familial conspirators would always put the feline out before the Patriarch returned, although the man took to sniffing for the animal and complained bitterly about “cat stink.” “No cats! I said no cats!” And then one fateful afternoon, the interloper gave birth in the family’s hamper on one of the paternal shirts, a gray work shirt with the name of the business, Hiram’s, embroidered on the pocket. A domestic battle ensued, which led to the act Rune then described. His father scooped up the litter of tiny, blind pink bodies in paper napkins and drowned them in a bucket in the garage as his mother screamed “No!” and the children cowered in the doorway. When Mr. Larsen retreated back to the laundry room to grab the tabby and expel her permanently from the household, Mrs. Larsen kneeled beside the crime-scene bucket and fished out the corpses as she howled, “I hate you! You monster!” The neighbors called the police. By then, Mr. Larsen had come to regret the massacre, and had apologized to his spouse, but Mrs. Larsen would have none of it. The officers managed to frighten her into silence, but there was no reconciliation between the couple, despite the fact that Mr. Larsen, according to his son, begged and blubbered and, at one point, kneeled in contrition. In the morning, the children found the cat remains on the garage floor. Rune’s descriptive adjective for the poor stiffs was “gross.” Kirsten orchestrated a proper burial in the garden, complete with prayers, but her brother did not participate. “I decided,” Rune said, “right then and there, looking at those disgusting dried-up little pieces of shit, that I wasn’t going to be me anymore.”

When I asked him what he meant, he said he knew that he didn’t belong to those people, and he never would. They weren’t going to see him again. I asked him if he had run away. No, he didn’t mean that, he meant that they could see someone, but not him. “I’d give them Rune Two, Rune Three, or Rune Four, but never Rune One. They couldn’t tell the difference. As long as I didn’t bother them, what did they care?” He said the cat kept coming around looking for her kittens, meowing outside the door. He used to go out and talk to her, pet her, and give her something to eat. His mother, it seemed, had lost all interest in her former cause. “She became my cat,” Rune said. “I had her spayed with money I stole from Sharon’s purse. She never noticed the cash was gone, or if she did notice, she probably thought she had spent it on the booze she imagined she was hiding so carefully. I never let my cat into the house. I’d go out to her.”

Rune smiled at me. The ready adjective for that facial expression among many of my colleagues would have been
sphinxlike
, but I work hard to keep my prose unsullied by slack clichés, not that anyone truly notices in our illiterate age. The man’s smile was illegible. I put the family cat histrionics into
Martyred for Art
because I admired the idea of numbered Runes, whether he had invented it on the spot for my benefit or not. It captured his aesthetic and a longing for virtual selves: one, two, three, four, and (the coming rhyme is intentional) perhaps more.

The Barometer

(excerpt from Phineas Q. Eldridge’s taped conversation, October 15, 2001)

PQE: How did you get interested in the weather?

B: From God. Beginning and end. He is, I proclamate, all weather, the weatherman of all and allness, of all’s well that ends well. Windy pressures ride high in his blasted being of beginnings and endings. You understand he is a totalitarian, but also a hotelitarian, who takes in mankind, takes him in to the inn, but then blows him down. The song goes, “Blow the man down, O give me some time, and give me some rhyme and blow, blow, blow the man down.” Blow that puny little butthead, Man, man and his kind, into ribbons and smithereens. How does he do it? It’s a big secret deal of the Potentate, the Reprobate, the Pulverizer and Mercifier, the Big Blue Sky Daddy who dreams on our screens. That’s what happened with the World and Trade, the Power towers. God had a nightmare, you see, and it went viral onto every TV and computer and also into the heads of every geek tuned into the net. Divine Head, the godhead storms onto the earth, his curse on our things, but no things we can understand or demand or remand or take in hand. I am blessed with inside scoops of ice cream and then I scream on these matters, these barometric matters that aren’t matter, but air issues for fair, fair weather, which should be fair, but often are not fair, in that life is not fair. It all registers, tremors and tickles and rumbles, ups and downs in my organs and my head, in the gray pulp up there with graphs and that little needle wobbling, you know, in there, too. My head has a direct connection to the godhead, two heads, and it can be too much, way too much for me, and some days I can’t manage the management of the bandages needed, too many, when the earth and the air are crying outside and inside my head . . .

PQE: You’ve lived with Harry for quite some time now. I’ve heard you say you want to leave, but you end up staying.

B: The reasons are demonish.

PQE: Demonish?

B: The bad angel who comes sometimes at the dark hour, stealing around in Harry’s things, into her world of the metamorphoses and the changelings. The Barometer can feel him, his omens. I stay as the barrier, the needle speeds when he’s here. I can wrestle. I was on the team. I will wrestle. Jacob wrestled him. The sinew of Jacob’s thigh shrank.

PQE: Yes, they wrestled all night. I always found it rather homoerotic. But you don’t mean Bruno, do you?

B: Bruno is not an angel. Have you no eyes? Are you blind, blind and unkind? He comes when you’re gone, Phineas. He hides behind the buildings and the trash cans. He keeps his wings folded in, big, awful, veiny wings. He’s fallen, you know, fell from Heaven to here below, to keep us low, to build our ruin, but nothing broke when he fell, and now he roams through wood and waste, over hill and dale to the place where Longitude meets Latitude, you see, don’t you, he’s fallen down, the Arch-Enemy. If he touches you, you burn and shrivel. Look here on my arm.