And then, after the how-do-ye-do and the glances at the stiff paper menu and the ordering and the waiter who tells you his name is Roy or Ramon, in short after all the awkward pleasantry that goes on whenever two strangers embark on that voyage known as going-out-to-dinner, the gods or the angels or the fairies or the movie stars — any one of those unreal heavenly beings we all half believe in when convenient — smiled down on us as we sailed from salads of baby greens into a chicken dish we both ordered, a bit dry, with mushrooms. But while we were ingesting the desiccated fowl, it happened again: The authorized Bruno came roaring back in triumph to charm the Lady of the Coats, who charmed him back because she was funny and smart and oblique, too, making arcane comments even the full-blown genuine Bruno couldn’t really penetrate, but which made him awfully curious; and when the lady breathed, her breasts breathed with her, and he had to shut his eyes a couple of times to keep his head on straight.
I think there were diamonds in her ears, and I know there was perfume in the general atmosphere of the table wafting over and up into my nostrils, a scent she said Napoleon, pipsqueak conqueror of Europe, had concocted for one of his wives, Josephine. He had just two, one fewer than me. The arrogant son of a bitch once said, “I am the revolution.” Well, that evening the revolution of Bruno Kleinfeld had begun, and I knew it had to be carried through or I would live forever as a state divided.
I listened to her. I am not cynical when I say this is the first rule of seduction. There is no seduction without big listening ears. Call me Harry, she said. I called her Harry. I listened to her tell me about her two grown-up kids, one documentary filmmaker, one prose writer, and the grandchild who could do somersaults and had developed unusual passions for Buster Keaton and Peggy Lee, and about her dead husband, who had been half Thai, half English, the son of a diplomat, a man who had been at home everywhere and nowhere. He sounded like a smoothie to me — a lot of money and a lot of angles — the kind of guy who steals into a smoke-filled bar in one of those Hollywood movies from the forties, wearing a white dinner jacket as he scans the room with his foreigner’s eyes.
I couldn’t really get a handle on Harry, on who she was, that is. She was frank and forthright, but there was hesitation in her, too. She formed her sentences slowly, as if she were thinking about each word. She spoke at some length about Bosch, about how much she loved his demons and “mutations.” She loved Goya. She called him “a world apart.” “He was not afraid to look,” she said, “even though there are things that should not be seen.” Sometime around the second glass of wine, she lowered her voice as if she were afraid the couple at the next table would overhear her. There had been a little boy, she said, who lived under her bed in her family’s apartment on Riverside Drive. “He breathed fire.” Her exact words. He breathed fire. Harry did not say “imaginary boy” or “imaginary friend.” She placed her long hands on the tablecloth, leaned toward me, inhaled and exhaled. “I wanted to fly, you see, and breathe fire. Those were my dearest wishes, but it was forbidden, or I felt it was forbidden. It has taken me a very long time, a very long time to give myself permission to fly and breathe fire.”
I did not say I hoped she would breathe fire on me, although the hankering to say it was strong. I made some other crack, and she laughed. She had good teeth, Harry did, nice even white teeth, and a sonorous laugh, a big fat laugh that gave me amnesia, that wiped out years of my life in the rat hole, that made me feel light and free and, as I said to her, unburdened, unburdened because Harriet Burden’s laugh lifted LIU and the poem and the chipped linoleum right up and off of me. I don’t know why, but my pun on her name made her serious, and her lips quivered. I thought she might break down on the spot with the weepies and water her half-eaten chicken, so I swooped in. I swooped in with Thomas Traherne. Nothing could have been better than my old friend Tom, dead in 1674, an ecstatic versifier if there ever was one, a poet all but lost until 1896 when some anonymous but curious soul discovered a manuscript in a London bookstall. I had memorized Traherne’s poem “Wonder” years earlier. All at once, the third stanza popped into my head, and I read it straight off some sheet of paper inside my skull as the lady of my heart looked at me all atremble:
Harsh ragged objects were concealed;
Oppressions, tears, and cries,
Sins, griefs, complaints, dissensions, weeping eyes
Were hid, and only things revealed
Which heavenly spirits and the angels prize.
The state of innocence
And bliss, not trades and poverties,
Did fill my sense.
It was a wonder that we found each other, Harry and I. It’s still a wonder. My Harry was a wonder.
She took me home, and when we walked into her gigantic place with the wall of windows that looked over the water, and the long blue sofas, a space that was still raw but not raw, if you see what I mean, fashionably raw, with art on one wall and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with a couple of thousand volumes along another, and big old rugs on the floor and a shiny kitchen with pots hanging from a ceiling rack, I said to myself, it’s paradise, man, pure paradise, no cracks and crumbs and dust mites and roaches, and it’s right across the street! Then Harry showed me the studio floor right below. We walked down a flight of stairs. She flicked on some lights, and I noted the long hallway, lined with doors, one after the other, and I heard somebody snoring behind one of them. I didn’t ask. It was all going so well I didn’t want to screw it up.
Harry opened up double doors on the other side of the hall, turned on more lights to illuminate her workspace. I will not pretend that Harry’s art didn’t scare me a little. To be honest, that first night it gave me a voodoo feeling. I walked right under a flying cock, as in penis, not rooster, authentic-looking as hell, and there were several bodies in progress, at least five of the former spouse in miniature, and other figures that were life-size with clothes on, lying around like so many corpses. She had massive machines and racks of tools that reminded me of medieval torture instruments, and in the middle of the floor there was a big glass box with mirrors inside it and a couple of human shapes that gave me the willies. Louise had said there were people in the hood who called her “the Witch,” and I had said, “Come on. That’s just stupid.” But the place had an infernal quality, no doubt about it. I half expected that fire-breathing brat she had told me about at dinner to come flying out of the beams. The elegant Lady of the Coats was making some weird shit, and I confess that when I looked around that massive factory, I felt the minor character creeping up in me again. He was a shrinker, and I shrank.
Harry was so excited, she didn’t notice. She smiled and pointed at her creations and talked more fluently than she had all evening, telling me she was working through certain ideas; she wanted to represent ideas in bodies, embodied minds, and play with perceptual expectations. She liked Husserl, another incomprehensible German she probably read on the F train. I read a lot, but philosophy tires me out fast. Give me Wallace Stevens’s version of philosophy any day. She wanted me to understand. She wanted me to get it: operational intentionality. So the shrinker just nodded. Yup, Husserl, yup, good. Aha.