The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt Page A

Burden’s daughter, I got the artist’s telephone number in Brooklyn and called her. I introduced myself, explained the nature of my call, and asked her if she had been to the gallery to see the show, to which she answered, “No.” I discovered later that this was technically true. I then asked her if she was still making art. She said, “Yes.” I waited for her to say something more, then elaborated further, saying that aspects of the work seemed so close to hers that I found it alarming. There was a long, awkward silence. I could hear her breathing. Finally, she cleared her throat and then said, “Thank you. Thank you for calling. Goodbye.”
    That was it. I had given her an opening. She didn’t take it. Harriet Burden had allies. I count myself among them. I am convinced that had she looked for a dealer, she would have found one, but even if she hadn’t, she could have taken another route. There are women’s cooperatives that show artists who fail to receive recognition from mainstream venues. I have seen some very good work exhibited in those galleries. Burden wanted her experiment, and she wanted to remain hidden. I can’t help but wish that she had been able to answer me then. At the same time, the masks must be considered as furthering what she did best—creating works of focused ambiguity.

Bruno Kleinfeld
    (written statement)

    I met Harry during a dog-eared, smudged, scribbled-in-the-margins, stained, and torn chapter of my life. But that was a cosmetic problem, really. I am the proud owner of any number of tattered and beaten biographies that are still decipherable. Time creeps. Time alters. Gravity insists. As my mother used to say to me, “After fifty, Bruno, it’s just patch, patch, patch.” No, it wasn’t my going-on-sixty carcass with receding hairline and basset-hound cheeks that made that chapter so bad. It was that I had lost me. I was no longer the hero of my own life. Instead, I was lurking in the proverbial shadows as some goddamned minor character with only a couple of lines of dialogue here and there. Imagine getting up in the morning and scouring the apartment for yourself, turning out drawers and rifling through closets and checking under the bed for yourself. Where had I mislaid him, that bright, curly-headed youth with prospects shining just over yonder hill? Whatever happened to Bruno Kleinfeld? You may well ask. My person seemed to have sidelined itself in ways that meant I was no longer I. The imposter, Bruno Kleinfeld, the one who woke up in the morning in the ratty apartment in Red Hook, would have been a big surprise to the actual Bruno Kleinfeld, who was traveling boldly from one chapter to another in his fully authorized biography. But I simply couldn’t lay my hands on that Bruno and found myself stuck with the former, a sad sack who regularly ate Spaghetti Os for dinner and twice in desperation descended to gourmet tidbits for the doggy set. You see, he couldn’t pay his rent and had to go panhandling to his old friend Tip Barrymore in Park Slope, whose brownstone life looked far more like the one the genuine Bruno was living. Eyes. It’s all in the eyes. Tip’s eyes when he said he didn’t need it back. “I don’t need it back, Brune.” Brune is the only way to shorten Brun-O. Pupils askance, furtive, not straight double-barreled, not man to man. Poor Brune. He didn’t say it. Oh no. His eyes said it. Pity the bright boy of yonder hill? What the fuck? You’ve got the wrong guy, bub, the wrong Brun-O, old man. Take it on the chin. Take it in the gut. Garçon! Bring me a glass of the Fronsac and the steak frites tout de suite . With mayonnaise! Little dreams of meals. Little dreams of no roaches, of a smoothly working, rust-free toilet, of linoleum without chips and yellow stains. The sad little dreams of the poseur, that fake Kleinfeld of swollen proportions and disabled swing with no pop. Who was that guy that used to hit them over the fence, used to speed around