I Love Dick (2 page)

Sylvère, who's typing this, says this letter lacks a point. What
reaction
am I looking for? He thinks this letter is too literary, too Baudrillardian. He says I'm squashing out all the trembly little things he found so touching. It's not the Dumb Cunt Exegesis he expected. But Dick, I know that as you read this, you'll know these things are true. You understand the game is
real
, or even better than, reality, and better than is what it's all about. What sex is better than drugs, what art is better than sex?
Better than
means stepping out into complete intensity. Being in love with you, being ready to take this ride, made me feel 16, hunched up in a leather jacket in a corner with my friends. A timeless fucking image. It's about not giving a fuck, or seeing all the consequences looming and doing something anyway. And I think you—I—keep looking for that and it's thrilling when you find it in other people.

Sylvère thinks he's that kind of anarchist. But he's not. I love you Dick.

Chris

But after finishing these, Chris and Sylvère both felt they could do better. That there were things still left to say. So they began a second round, spending most of Friday sitting on their living room floor in Crestline passing the laptop back and forth. And they each wrote a second letter, Sylvère about jealousy, Chris about the Ramones and the Kierkegaardian third remove. “Maybe I'd like to be like you,” Sylvère wrote, “living all alone in a house surrounded by a cemetery. I mean, why not take the shortcut? So I got really involved in the fantasy, erotically too, because desire radiates, even if it is not directed towards you, and it has an energy and beauty, and I think I was turned on to Chris being turned on to you. After awhile it became difficult to remember that nothing really happened. I guess in some dark corner of my mind I realized if I wasn't going to be jealous, my only choice was to enter this fictional liaison in a sort of perverse fashion. How else could I take my wife having a crush on you? The thoughts that come to mind are pretty distasteful:
ménage à trois
, the willing husband…all three of us are too sophisticated to deal in such dreary archetypes. Were we trying to open up new ground? Your cowboy persona meshed so well with the dreams Chris has of the torn and silent desperate men she's been rejected by. The fact that you don't return messages turns your answerphone into a blank screen onto which we can project our fantasies. So in a sense I did encourage Chris, because thanks to you, she's been reminded of a bigger picture, the way she was last month after visiting Guatemala, and we're all potentially bigger people than we are. There's so much we haven't talked about. But maybe that's just the way to become closer friends. To share thoughts that may not be shared…”

Chris' second letter was less noble. She started off by rhapsodizing once again about Dick's face: “I started looking at your face that night in the restaurant—oh wow, isn't that like the first line in the Ramones song,
Needles & Pins
? ‘I saw your face/It was the face I loved/And I knew'—and I got the same feeling from it that I get every-time I hear that song, and when you called my heart was pounding and then I thought that maybe we could do something together, something that is to adolescent romance what the Ramone's cover of the song is to the original. The Ramones give
Needles & Pins
the possibility of irony, but the irony doesn't undercut the song's emotion, it makes it stronger and more true. Søren Kierkegaard called this “the Third Remove.” In his book
The Crisis In The Life Of An Actress
, he claims no actress can play 14-year-old Juliette until she's at least 32. Because acting's art, and art involves reaching through some distance. Playing the vibrations between here and there and then and now. And don't you think reality is best attained through dialectics? PS, Your face is mobile, craggy, beautiful…”

By the time Sylvère and Chris finish their second letters, it's the end of the afternoon. Lake Gregory shimmers in the distance, ringed by snowy mountains. The landscape's fiery and distant. For now both of them are satisfied. Memories of domesticity when Chris was young, 20 years before: a China eggcup and a teacup, painted people circling around it, blue and white. A bluebird at the bottom of the cup, seen through amber tea. All the prettiness in the world contained in these two objects. When Chris and Sylvère put away the Toshiba laptop it's already dark. She fixes dinner. He returns to working on his book.

EXHIBIT B:   HYSTERIA

PART 1. SYLVÈRE FLIPS OUT

Crestline, California

December 10, 1994

Dear Dick,

This morning I woke up with an idea. Chris should send you a short note breaking out of this stuffy, referential delirium. Here's how it should read:

“Dear Dick, l am taking Sylvère to the airport Wednesday morning. I need to talk to you. Can we meet at your place?”

Love,
Chris

I thought it was a brilliant coup: a piece of reality shattering this twisted hotbed of emotions. Because after all, our letters were so self directed,
marriage a deux
. Actually that's the title I thought of for this piece before I went to sleep and I wanted to communicate it to Chris as soon as she woke up. But it had the opposite effect. After last night's brainstorming, she'd somehow put aside her infatuation with you. She was back on the safe side—marriage, art, the family—but my concern reignited her obsession and suddenly we were thrown back into the reality of unreality, the challenge at the bottom of it all. Outwardly it has to do with Chris' apprehension about turning 40, or so she says. I'm afraid my letters have been too high-minded and patronizing. Anyway, let me try again—

Sylvère

California scrubjays screeched outside the master bedroom. Sylvère sat propped against two pillows, typing, looking out through the glass doors across the deck. No matter how many times they tried to change it, so long as he and Chris slept together their days rarely started before noon. While Chris still dozed, Sylvère would make the first coffee of the day and carry it back to the bedroom. Then Chris would tell Sylvère her dreams, and after that her feelings, and Sylvère would be the best, most subtle and associative listener she'd ever find. Then Sylvère would go to make the toast and second coffees. As the caffeine hit, the conversation shifted, became more general, ranging over everything and everyone they knew. They dug each other's references and felt smarter in each other's presence. Sylvère and Chris were among the five most well-read people they each knew, and this a constant miracle, since neither of them had been to good schools. She felt so peaceful with him. Sylvère, Sylvalium, accepted her so totally and she took little sips of coffee to clear her head of morning dreams.

Sylvère never dreamed and rarely knew what he was feeling. So they played a game sometimes that they'd devised to tease his feelings out: Objective Correlative. Who was Sylvère's metonymic mirror? A student at the art school? Their dog? The Dart Canyon Storage man?

Fully awake around 11, the conversation usually peaked with a passionate discussion of checks and bills. So long as Chris continued making independent films they'd always be juggling money, thousands here and thousands there. Chris spent time buying or acquiring long-term leases to three apartments and two houses which they kept rented at a profit while holing up in rural slums. She kept Sylvère apprised of the status of their mortgages, taxes, rental income and repair bills. And luckily, beyond this primitive foray into acquisition, with Chris' help Sylvère's career was becoming lucrative enough to offset the losses incurred by hers. Chris, a diehard feminist who often saw herself as spinning on a great Elizabethan Wheel of Fortune, smiled to think that in order to continue making work she would have to be supported by her husband. “Who's independent?” Isabelle Huppert's pimp demanded, spanking her in the backseat of a car in
Sauve Qui Peut
. “The maid? The bureaucrat? The banker? No!” Yeah. In late capitalism, was anyone truly free? Sylvère's fans were mostly young white men drawn to the more “transgressive” elements of modernism, heroic sciences of human sacrifice and torture as legitimized by Georges Bataille. They scotch-taped xeroxes of the famous “Torture of a Hundred Pieces” photo from Bataille's
Tears of Eros
to their notebooks—a regicide captured on gelatin-plate film by French anthropologists in China in 1902. The Bataille Boys saw beatitude in the victim's agonized expression as the executioner sawed off his last remaining limb. But even more inexcusably, they were often rude to Chris. Going out to Exchange Ideas with Sylvère Lotringer in bars after his lectures in Paris, Berlin and Montreal, the Boys resented any barrier (especially a wife, and an unseductive one at that) between themselves and the great man. Chris responded by milking money from Sylvère's growing reputation, setting ever-higher fees. Would the German money and the $2,000 from Vienna be enough to pay her lab bill in Toronto? No. They'd better hit up Dieter for per diem. Et cetera. Around noon, after Coffee Number 3, too buzzed to think about anything but money, they hit the phone.

Dick's presence in their lives was a vacation from this kind of scheming. It was a foray into scheming of another kind. That Saturday when they drank their morning coffee they were already planning a second round of letters, juggling Sylvère's laptop between toast and coffee mugs. Sylvère, a great reviser, didn't like the sound of his first letter. And so he wrote:

Crestline, California

December 10, 1994

Dear Dick,

Last night I fell asleep thinking of a great title for our piece:

Ménage à Deux
. But when I woke up it seemed too conclusive and too lame. Have Chris and I spent this past week in turmoil just to turn our lives into a text? While making coffee I came up with the perfect solution, a way of instantly reshuffling the cards. Because Dick, Chris and I have been debating whether we should send the letters that we wrote to you last night. It's a crazy distillation of our mental state and you, poor Dick, do not deserve to be exposed to such a masturbatory passion. I imagine our 14 pages emerging line by line from your deserted fax. To even consider sending them was crazy. These letters weren't meant for you; they were a dialectical resolution of a crisis that never was. So that's why I thought of sending you this terse injunction:

Dear Dick, I'm taking Sylvère to the airport Wednesday morning. I need to talk to you.

Love,
Chris

What are you going to do with that? Probably not answer!

Sylvère

All his life since age 19, Sylvère Lotringer had wanted to be a writer. Carrying a huge tape recorder on the back of his Vespa motorscooter around the British Isles, he'd made interviews in faulty English with all the literary greats—T.S. Eliot, Vita Sackville-West and Brendan Behan—for a French communist literary magazine. He was away from his Holocaust survivor family on the scabby rue des Poissonières for the first time and this was freedom. Two years later, studying at the Sorbonne with Roland Barthes, he wrote an essay on
The Function of Narrative Throughout History
. This was published in a prestigious literary magazine called
Critique
. The rest was history. His. He became a specialist of narrative, not a creator of it. Because the French draft for the Algerian war was on, he started trundling between teaching jobs in Turkey and Australia and finally America. Now 40 years later he was writing about Antonin Artaud, trying to find some link between Artaud's madness and the madness of World War 2. In all these years Sylvère'd never written, really, anything he loved or anything about the War (same thing). And he remembered how David Rattray'd said once about Antonin Artaud: “It's like the rediscovery of the truths of Gnosticism, the notion that this universe is crazy…” Well Artaud was plenty crazy and so was David. And maybe now instead of just being unhappy Sylvère could be crazy too? So he continued: