And then, as I neared them, I saw Harry ball up her fist and hit him in the face hard. He stumbled backward, his mouth open as he yelled in pain. I started to run toward them, but so did everybody else within shouting distance. When I reached them, I saw Rune with his hand to his mouth, blood pouring over his fingers. But Harry hadn’t finished. She threw herself at him again and punched him in the stomach. He cried out as he held his gut, but he recovered, grabbed her by the shoulders, and heaved her away from him. She lost her footing and sailed backward onto the ground. A woman wearing owl glasses and a red-and-black-checked jacket ran over to Harry and crouched beside her. I noticed that Harry’s coat was bloody, probably Rune’s blood. She saw me, her old lover come to witness the fracas, and looked up with a surprised face, but no anger, not a trace of anger. Two men had grabbed Rune by the arms to restrain him from further violence. He was saying, She attacked me, for Christ’s sake. She attacked me. This was in fact the God’s honest truth, but who is going to defend a man standing over an unarmed woman whom he has just thrown to the ground?
Rune avoided my eyes, and this pleased me. He knew that I knew. “Oh-the-poet” knew he, Rune, was a goddamned liar and thief. There were questions in that citizen huddle about whether to call the police, about whether to press charges, but it was determined that neither combatant wanted the law involved, and while the discussions went on, Rune fished out a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket and, cupping his hand around a lighter, carefully dragged in the smoke to avoid his fat, bloody lip, and looked casually around him. I’m going to leave now. This is absurd. She’s nuts. Anyone who saw her hit me knows she’s nuts.
And after the committee had all agreed to it, Rune left. He turned on his heels and strode down the walk beside the water.
Harry hadn’t moved. The owl woman gave her a kindly pat and, understanding that the emotional bomb had been defused, she and the other concerned folk who had intervened wandered off to their lives, a few of them turning to look at us to make sure the felled lady was in good hands.
Oh, Harry, I said.
She started to nod at me. Her chin moved mechanically up and down. Her mouth stretched into a grimace, and she squinted to shut out the tears, grabbed her head with her hands, and rocked back and forth. Oh, Bruno, she cried. I’m so lost.
And then I said the right thing for once. I said, That was a nice right hook, Harry.
I practiced, Bruno, she said. I practiced on the bag. And then she lifted up her swollen right hand to show me, and I saw the bruises forming already. The injured warrior slumped toward me, and I gathered her up, as the saying goes. I gathered up Harry in my arms, and we walked haltingly back to the lodge together, bandaged her hand, and celebrated our reunion.
Your body / has not become yours only nor left my body mine only. Capacious, he was, Whitman, and greedy, greedy for people. He wanted to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch people. He rolled around in their humanness. He sucked in the city and its crowds as tactile realities. We went to sleep that night in Harry’s big bed folded in each other, and before we slept, I thought of the bard sailing over the world as he surveyed his sleepers in the great democracy that is sleep. All of us creatures have to sleep.
After her first and what would be her last fistfight, Harry didn’t speak of Rune or the project or her resentments much anymore, not to me, anyway. I have been thrown back on myself, she liked to say. I have taken the Kierkegaardian position. The Kierkegaardian mingled with tragic queen. Harry quoted Margaret Cavendish regularly, that colorful lady philosopher, whose most fervent hope was that she would find readers after she was dead. The Duchess of Newcastle had dreamed of a glorious posthumous life when she would finally be appreciated. I had never heard of Cavendish before I met Harry, patriarchal dupe that I am, but Harry loved her. Dead in 1673, her work had been dismissed, ignored, or denigrated for more than three hundred years until she rose again and people began to take notice. Harry embraced the duchess as a battered and rejected sister striver in a man’s world.
Harry returned to her Margaret, her Blazing World Mother creature she had begun much earlier and had nearly finished, but which she had abandoned because this monster had never satisfied her. When I first saw the huge, grinning, naked, heated-up, pregnant mama with her hanging boobs squatting in the studio, she gave me a start. This was no sweet, dreaming, oversized odalisque like the one Harry made for that kid, Tish. This woman had worlds inside her. When you looked up and into her bald, see-through cranium, you saw little people, hoards of busy wax Lilliputians going about their business. They ran and jumped. They danced and sang. They sat at miniature desks facing computers, typewriters, or pages. When you looked closely, you could see they were making musical scores, drawings, mathematical formulas, poems, and stories. One dumpy old guy was writing Confessions of a Minor Poet. There were seven lascivious couples going at it upstairs in the female Gulliver’s head — men and women, men and men, women and women — a regular orgy. There was a bloody sword fight and a murderer with a gun, looking down at his victim’s corpse. There was a unicorn and a minotaur and a satyr and a fat angel woman with wings and lots of chubby babies in all colors. Downstairs — that is, from between the labial folds of her enormous vagina — the fertile matriarch popped out another city of little humanoids. Harry worked hard with her suspension wires in order to achieve the effect: Some of the teeny ones were suspended in midair between the giant doll’s birth canal and the ground. Others had already landed and were seen crawling, walking, running, or skipping away from their giant originator in several directions.
Harry didn’t believe the piece was finished. It’s wrong, she said, too comic. She added letters and numbers in many colors. She added more figures. It wouldn’t matter, she said, whether anyone saw them or not. She needed to make them, and she did, small, perfectly formed wax persons. She sewed clothes for some and left others naked. She could work on them almost anywhere, and more than once I sat down on a hard little body on the sofa, smothering some man or woman or child under my colossal ass. After these accidents, Harry would take the poor rumpled critter from me, rearrange its hair or limbs, and generally fuss over it. Why, it’s you, Cornelius, she would say, or: Keisha, I wondered what had happened to you. In Harrydom, nobody went nameless.
She wrote and read as well. She punched her punching bag (good exercise and cathartic release of perpetual anger) and visited her shrink cum usual. Maisie’s film Body Weather about our own household lunatic came out in September. Harry was red-faced with pride at the opening in New York at the Quad Cinema on Thirteenth Street. Maisie has a gift for making insanity look, if not normal, at least comprehensible. Halfway through the film, the Barometer’s father, Rufus Dudek, a tired man with bloodshot eyes, who still lives in the godforsaken Nebraska town where he raised his sons, holds up the prodigious drawings his youngest boy, Alan (later the Barometer), made when he was seven years old, and proceeds to tell the off-camera Maisie about the tornado that killed his wife. A wall of the family’s trailer caved in and crushed her while he and his boys were out “visiting.” Alan Dudek’s mother died of weather. Alan made his way to New York and the Studio School, but while he was in a life-drawing class he cracked up and was hauled off to the first of many psychiatric wards. He was twenty-two when he became the Barometer, a man who quiets the winds and stirs them up, a man who feels the motion of the spheres via his high-tech, super-duper, but ever-so-fragile nervous system.