Harry leaned forward, both hands in front of her over the soggy napkin. I covered her right hand with my own and felt grateful that we had been seated in a corner and that she was now speaking in a voice so soft I had to lean close to her to hear what she was saying. She wanted to know if I remembered the grand plans we had had for our futures. We were both going to be famous women, remember? I remembered. Harry smiled at me. We raised our consciousnesses. Do you remember? I remembered. It didn’t do any good, Harry said. What I raised turned out to be false consciousness. She had become an artist, all right, but no one can be an artist when her work always comes second to everyone and everything else. She had never been first in anything. Ever. Harry pulled her hand away from under mine and looked at me with tears in her eyes.
I pointed out to Harry that she had actually been first in our Hunter class, to which she said, A lot of good it did me. Harry’s grievances rolled out of her. She had adored Felix, she said, something Bruno could not accept because he was jealous of her dead husband, but it was her mad love for Felix that had made it so hard for her to oppose him. He had made her feel interesting and beautiful, and she had tried hard to be what she thought he had wanted her to be. This is what I mean, Rachel. What are we? What was Felix and what was me? He was in me. She had always read Felix for his wishes, had always bent herself to him, and it hadn’t been so hard, because deep inside her she hadn’t believed that it should be the other way around. Why should he bend to her wishes? Who was she to ask that? Bend, bend, bend, Harry said, always bending and swaying, bending and swaying. Then Harry remembered her mother bending over to pick up her father’s socks and shorts, remembered her mother serving her father at the table, remembered her mother kneeling on the floor with a toothbrush to clean the grout between the tiles, remembered her small mother smiling anxiously up at her father to read his eyes. Did he approve? Was he happy? Harry said she had found herself tiptoeing past Felix’s study so as not to disturb him on the days when he had worked at home, had squelched her opinions at dinners because Felix hated conflict, but he would march into her studio without knocking to ask her some trivial question. He would criticize an artist at a dinner party, and everyone would listen rapt to the great man’s opinion. Sometimes he’d regurgitate Harry’s own words, words she had spoken earlier at the very same dinner, but to which no one had listened. This was true. I remembered several occasions when I had been an uncomfortable witness to those unfortunate repetitions. I did not say to Harry that Felix inspired confidence because he combined authority with a cool, unflappable demeanor. He didn’t need people to listen to him. Harry did.
For years, Harry said, Felix had interrupted her mid-sentence, and she would go silent. That’s just how it was. Felix had always said that he admired and supported her work, but he had flown here and there for his own work, and he had called to say he’d be late or had changed his flight, and Harry had stayed home with Maisie and Ethan. Yes, yes, yes, she said, she had had help, all she wanted, but you can’t farm out your children’s souls to others. And although Maisie had been a relatively easy child, Ethan had been difficult, hypersensitive and prone to explosions. His voracious needs had sometimes swallowed her whole. He had grown up all right, she said. He had become a strong, functioning person, but what if she hadn’t sat up with him at night, holding his hand, singing the odd, repetitive Philip Glass — like songs she had discovered were the only ones that soothed him. Harry sang a few bars under her breath: Bleep, bang, rum, rum, rum. Drum, drum, drum. Thrum, thrum, thrum. And the guilt, guilt, guilt, she said wryly to me, the guilt, guilt, guilt that she was to blame for his problems. I knew most of this, but I recognized that Harry needed to tell me, needed to explain. And, she said, she had never felt the money belonged to her. She hadn’t made it. Felix had started out with money and made much more. Over the years, she’d sold a few pieces of her art, nothing more. And the exhibitions she had had. Harry’s lips trembled. They were ignored or trashed.
I told her this wasn’t actually true. There had been some good reviews. There had. I remembered.
Harry’s face was a reproof. Money is power, she said. Men with money. Men with money make the art world go round. Men with money decide who wins and who loses, what’s good and what’s bad.
I offered the comment that this was changing, slowly perhaps, but changing nevertheless; that more and more women were getting their due. I had just read something about it…
Harry’s expression turned bitter. Even the most famous woman artist is a bargain compared to the most famous man — dirt cheap in comparison. Look at the divine Louise Bourgeois. What does that tell you? Harry’s voice cracked. Money talks. It tells you about what is valued, what matters. It sure as hell isn’t women.
She had all the answers. I didn’t reply. I looked down at the tablecloth and wondered what time it was, but I was too alert to Harry’s feelings to look at my watch. Maybe Harry had an inkling of what I was thinking, because she apologized to me. She said that she was selfish and obsessed and carried away and that she loved me. She asked me about Ray’s health, and I told her he was doing well, still bicycling in the park three times a week with his doctor’s approval, and he seemed sanguine about his retirement from NYU in the spring. He had hated the idea of forced retirement, but now his whole attitude had changed. She even asked me about Otto, and I said our nutty pooch had turned twelve and had to take both an antidepressant and an anti-inflammatory drug for arthritis. Harry smiled. We’re all getting old, she said, old and older.
I nodded. We talked about Maisie’s film Body Weather, about the psychotherapist who was seeing the Barometer and about the antipsychotics the man refused to take. I thought they might help him. Harry did not. Before we parted, Harry brought up Felix again, this time his love life, or rather the part of it that did not include her. Felix’s bisexuality has now become a public fact. The book The Days of the Felix Lord Gallery, which was published only a few months ago (in which the author, James Moore, treats Harry’s work with great respect and seriousness, I am happy to say), discussed the subject openly. A number of his lovers stepped into the open to talk about him, so however secret his adventures may have been while he was alive, they are not secret anymore. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that Felix’s sex life remains a mystery in the sense that the inside story cannot really be known. If one gains anything over the years working as I do, it is an overwhelming sympathy for the variations of human desire. Sexual arousal is surely not under our control, although acting upon it may be. And the notion that we live in an age of sexual freedom is a half-truth. I have had many patients whose shame and misery about their sexual thoughts has made them ill. And it can take a long time to discover the forces that lie beneath a particular fantasy, whether the desire is for boys or girls or older men or women, the thin or the obese, whether it involves tenderness or cruelty, or whether it is aided by all manner of paraphernalia, standard or idiosyncratic. Is it not anathema in our culture to express even a hint of compassion for the man with pedophilic yearnings, or to acknowledge the simple truth that there are sexual encounters between adults and children that do not leave lasting scars on the latter?