And my refrain was: I told you so. I couldn’t help myself. I had told her so. Harry penned a flaming letter to Art Assembly, which was never published. She phoned Rune and screeched at his voice maiclass="underline" Liar, thief, horrible, horrible man, traitor. Her vituperation didn’t budge him. Harry contacted Anton Tish’s parents. His mother politely but firmly told her, “My son wants nothing to do with you.” Harry hired a shamus named Paille, a hazy-faced, laconic character with a Maine accent who specialized in blackmail and extortion. Paille tracked the kid to an ashram in India, to Thailand, and then to Malaysia, but after that, the boy’s path ended with his airline records. Paille promised to keep up the quest.
Methodically, deliberately, Harry compiled every shred, morsel, sliver, and dust mote of evidence to prove her case. As she dug into piles, riffled through papers, and hunted for signs of her creative ownership, it dawned on her — a rainy, bleak, gray illumination, to be sure — it dawned on Harry how carefully she had hidden her involvement. She unearthed early drawings in sketchbooks and some plans on her computer, but other drawings and further designs were in Rune’s possession. Her e-mails to him read like cryptograms, as did his to her. No slips. And the assistants, whom she assumed were in the know, were not. Even Edgar Holloway III, old studio hand, Friday to Harry’s Crusoe, had to admit that this time around he hadn’t suspected a thing. All he knew was that Harry had written a check for the work she had purchased from Rune as well as checks for the production of Beneath, but a benefactor is not a creator, and Rune had thanked her in print for her “support.”
Eldridge came through for her. Art Lights published the story of their work, but his page of eloquence touched very few people at the time. Harry’s experiment had been gutted and crushed, and she ranted in protest. Once the gears of despair began to turn, they banged and clinked with the same compulsive music. She had been robbed. No one understood her. No one paid attention to her. They were all blockheads, dupes of creeping sexism and phallus worship. Rune should be drawn and quartered, his eyes scooped out with razor-sharp grapefruit spoons and smashed into jelly with a hammer. Her life’s work had been ruined, the ambitious project carefully constructed from the blocks of her radiant intellect, one beautiful irony on top of another — which would prove once and for all her theories about sex bias and perception and God-knows-what-else had exploded in her face.
I begged her to give it up. Show your work now, I said. Take it to the cooperative here in Red Hook. Forget about pseudonyms and figments, your ironies and philosophies. Who cares about the incestuous art world of dupes and phonies. But Harry couldn’t give it up. Drowning, she clung fiercely to that small, splintered piece of mast bobbing in the ocean we call justice. There is no justice, of course, or very little of it, and counting on it as a life raft is a big mistake.
I wanted to cuddle her in my arms. I wanted to send her to those sweet, high places we had visited a couple hundred times already, but she pushed me away. She barked, sneered, and hissed. I am not the bad guy, I said to her, but somehow that’s what I’d become. One night she sat on the big bed, ferocious in her pain, and she taunted me. Who was I to say a word to her? I had ruined myself, hadn’t I? I had had everything — my Whitmanian gifts, my cock, the powers-that-be on my side — and I had thrown it away. She, on the other hand, had fought, worked and worked and worked like hell, and now she was betrayed. I was pathetic, yellow, a leech that lived off her good graces. (Read, her dough, or rather Lord’s dough.) Words had flown fast and cruel between us before, but this time her voice smacked me to the ground. My jolly, kind beloved had turned hard, sad, and mean. From my metaphorical position, laid out on my back in figurative dust, I called her a castrating bitch.
She stalked out of the room and did not return. After waiting up for her until three in the morning, I walked across the street to my hole and stayed there. We did not see each other or speak to each other for three long months. Most evenings after our breakup, I’d saunter over to Sunny’s with anxious thoughts of spotting Harry, but she was never there. I’d buttonhole some schlemiel at the bar and offer up the rousing but oh-so-sentimental tale of the great Bruno Kleinfeld’s decline and subsequent fall, the story of how it came to pass that the literary hero, K., in a far less glorious incarnation than the one who had preceded him, now drank away his evenings at the local bar, the very same hours of the day he had once spent with Our Lady of the Coats, the last great love of his life. When sufficiently doused and soused, K. moved into lachrymose mode, sniffling over his whiskey and swaying to music that came from the speaker over his head, only a foot above his darling’s drawing of Sunny’s motley regulars, a work of art that caused his heart to cleave in two.
Harry had fled to Nantucket. It’s nice to have houses to mope inside, large and empty, with the beds made up in advance. It was Maisie who called to tell me where Harry had gone. She said she wished we could patch it up, make it square, redo whatever it was that had gone wrong between us. Mother shouldn’t lose you, she said. You must forgive her, she said, as if I were the bad guy again, instead of the pining Romantic, for Christ’s sake. Both leech and castrator held their ground, however. It was a waste, a waste of time, a wasted time. I know that now, but then the world looked different to both of us. What can I say? My pride had been used as a snot rag, or that’s how it felt, so I knotted it up even more tightly, just to make sure it hurt keenly enough to justify my life as a suffering scrivener.
And then one early evening in spring, I was taking a leak with two lines from the divine Emily in my head—This slow day moved along— / I heard its axles go—and from the window I saw Harry striding on the street below, looking thin, too thin, ten pounds gone, at least, maybe more. The un-Harry, I said to myself, not my Harry. And for the second time in the course of our romantic entanglement, I galloped down the stairs and into the street after her, but I didn’t hail her. I hastened after her in the cold air and trotted along the water. Like a private dick tailing a suspect, I held my distance at about thirty yards, but then I thought, Run after her. Go get her, man. Hadn’t I done it once before? I was about to yell her name when I saw Rune loping toward her from the opposite direction, and I stopped in my tracks.
As I watched the two of them, their figures stood out against the expanses of gray sky and gray water — and above them were halos of yellow light on the low clouds. A wind blew Harry’s trench coat up behind her and pushed around her hair. A pair of gulls flapped, flapped and sailed, flapped, flapped, flapped and sailed again high over their heads. The scene is vivid, a hard, clear picture in my mental space, even though in hindsight the memory has an unreal, dreamlike feeling. I watched Harry plead with her hands. She shook them in his face. He leaned toward her. He must have been talking to her, but they were too far away for me to hear anything. Then he opened his arms, palms up, and shrugged his indifference at her. I didn’t really need to hear them. Their bodies spoke for them. Harry stepped forward, gripped him by the shoulders, and pushed. He stumbled backward, danced to regain his balance, and, once upright, he wiggled his hips and shoulders, swishing like a fairy, but why? He was taunting her, but what was it all about? The man continued his effeminate gestures, mincing and prancing and limp-wristing her, and I realized they were more mixed up in each other than I had known. God Almighty, had they been lovers? I thought. She was more than twenty years older than Rune. Sick confusion in the general vicinity of my lungs and then a piercing anxiety. I began to trot toward them, my protective instinct rising by the second.