The Correspondence Artist (21 page)

I
cried a little writing that last section. I wasn't crying about Djeli. Djeli moves me, of course – his heartbreaking falsetto, his warm, soft kiss under the naked moon, the way he sometimes tries to provoke me sexually through his political bombast – but all these things make me smile. They don't make me cry. The truth is, I was crying for Nelson Algren.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The strategic error was saying I cried a little in Gatwick Airport.

As I mentioned before, the paramour responded to this e-mail with a banal message about mosquitoes, and very shortly thereafter we were playing fort/da. I later learned that the phrase that triggered the cold spell was when I said I'd “cried a little.” This made my lover feel boxed in. Actually, reading it over now, I can understand that.

But what I started out saying was this: I honestly don't feel like crying right now over the paramour. In fact, I'm feeling extremely placid about things. I told you, when I wake up, I just want to get back to thinking about Tzipi.

 

 

 

I've gotten attached in different ways to all of the characters in this novel. Everything Santutxo's been through fascinates me, of course, and he's the wackiest, politically. In spite of everything, I fundamentally believe in his integrity. Even when he behaves badly – maybe especially then – I still admire that. I have the most affection for him, I think. Djeli's so beautiful. How could you not be moved by the delicate sound of his kora, and by that voice? I realize I should be nervous about this, but I'm completely sexually fixated on Binh. Every time I start working on a section about him, I have to stop halfway through to masturbate on my bed. I touch myself imagining that .mov file of his exquisite hard-on coming to life. I imagine him imagining me touching myself. But Tzipi was the one I fell in love with. Right now, I can't really imagine a world in which she didn't exist. Of all of my lovers, she's the most beautiful, the most vulnerable, the most brilliant, the most pathetic, the most loving, the most sadistic – the one closest to and furthest from the paramour. The one closest to and furthest from me.

Yesterday I went back and listened to the original recording of “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me” by Maurice Chevalier. It's very strange. Right in the middle he stops singing and goes into a kind of rap of the lyrics:

Even with his smarmy delivery, it's pretty stunning when he makes that little anti-slavery pitch.

 

 

 

Sometimes I write things and it's only after I sleep on them that I realize their obvious significance. This morning, for example, I woke up and saw the clear connection between the story of the beheading of Medusa, the fear of castration, and the decapitation of the dirty pictures that I send the paramour. Medusa is such a fantastic figure, because she represents both castration
and
a female abundant overcompensation for the absent phallus. I told you that even Tzipi was intrigued by Freud's assertion of Medusa's ability to turn men to stone as a sign of the “comforting erection.” Some comfort.

Of course, I thought I was just cropping my head out of those dirty digital pictures in case my e-mails accidentally went astray. But the Medusa subplot suggests another possibility: that my missing head is not only super-phallic – it's also capable of producing the ultimate hard-on.

I know, I know, wishful thinking.

 

 

 

I just got an e-mail from the paramour. It was very warm. It even made reference to a particular breathtaking aspect of our sex. This made me feel both affectionate and a little guilty. Before getting this e-mail, I had planned to write: Well, it's been about ten days since I heard from the paramour and our love is looking to me like a dying houseplant. You know, the last message I'd gotten was just that short, disgruntled one about the shrink. But I wasn't feeling sad about the lack of contact. On the contrary, I was marveling at my own canny manner of handling this situation. I was really much more preoccupied with Tzipi. So the coincidental thing about this is the explanation for the silence. What prompted this e-mail was a brief message from me saying that a colleague had just written me something mentioning the paramour, not knowing, of course, that we were intimate. What my colleague said was very complimentary. I knew that this comment would be of interest, so I passed it on. Then I said, “I think you have slipped far away right now and maybe I'll just hear tiny things from you every once in a while but I want you to know I hope you are happy and when I think of you it's with great tenderness.” I also said my writing was going very well. My lover responded humorously to the anecdote about my colleague, and wondered a little about what I'd said about distance, alleging not to feel overly far away, and explaining the gap in communication by saying, “I'm in love with my work right now.” And then came that tender reminiscence, nonetheless, of our particular and lovely way of fucking.

You can see why this is a little ironic – because of course I'm also in love with my work right now, and more specifically, with Tzipi Honigman. I'm tempted to tell my lover, who claims, as you know, to enjoy hearing about these things. I'm still not sure I believe this entirely. I'd also mentioned in my message that exboyfriend who rematerialized after all these years. I don't know if I mentioned this to be cruel or to be kind. I think I meant to be kind. I really do think of the paramour with great tenderness.

 

 

 

In July of 1952, after things had already fallen apart, Simone de Beauvoir wrote to Algren: “It seems to me I put my love for you in a deep, deep freezer, and it will never get out of it, but never get rotten or dead, neither. And I'll live with this useless deep frozen love, which is no trouble at all anyhow.”

 

 

 

Over the very last few warm days of autumn, 2005, Sandro and I went out to visit friends who had a beach house on the Jersey shore. We spent a couple of nights there and it was very beautiful. I wrote Tzipi from their house.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Only Tzipi could possibly understand the way the moon looked that night on her terrace in Neve Tzedek. We both saw it. It was so embarrassing. She had smilingly fingered the useless scarf and iPod holder, glanced at the unnecessary book. She took me out to show me the view. A breeze was blowing in off of Banana Beach, and you could faintly hear the hippie drummers banging on their congas in the sand. The wind was sweeping up Tzipi's gorgeous mane of hair, and she pulled it back and twisted it into a knot. Then she stepped behind me, combed my own long hair back with her fingertips, gently twisted it behind the nape of my neck, and leaned in and kissed me warmly just below my ear. She kept holding my hair up with her left hand, and I felt her right wrap around my stomach. My sex was wet. I thought I might faint. Ten minutes later I was breathing hotly into her mouth on her bed.

Of course Tzipi knew Jean Pierre Léaud. They actually spent about a week together on a friend's houseboat in the south of France in the '70s. She said he was a little crazy, but funny. That was when she still smoked.

 

 

I had an upsetting thought. I wondered if my corresponding figure in Simone de Beauvoir's life might not be Nelson Algren, but rather “the ugly woman,” Violette LeDuc. It's astonishing how much Simone writes to Algren about this woman.
As I mentioned, they used to meet for lunch once a month. But Simone gives much more frequent updates about her activities, always describing how this woman weeps and trembles in her presence, can't bear to hear of her other love affairs, writes obsessively about her sexual fantasies of Simone in her diaries. Simone says of this writing in the diaries, “It is tremendously good.” She says the ugly woman writes “a beautiful language,” daring and frighteningly honest. As I also mentioned, Simone expresses disdain for most women writers, who are, she says, “a little too sweet and subtle.” The ugly woman, she says, “writes like a man with a very feminine sensitiveness.” Actually, that's a better description of the paramour than it is of me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last winter Tzipi got the flu and it turned into a nasty upper respiratory infection. It's difficult for me to imagine her sick, because she's so strong. She didn't write for over a week and I began to worry. Two days after I sent this message she wrote back weakly that she'd been “dead for the last several days.” But the fever had broken.

The way she'd put it made me sad. And then I realized that my own message had been a little morbid, too. About Oscar Peterson having died, and then Benazir. Tzipi's strong as a horse but she is a hypochondriac. As you know, the paramour's afraid of dying. And in point of fact, at the age of 68, I guess it's realistic for Tzipi to be contemplating her own mortality. That night of our first intimacy, when she was fingering the scarf and the iPod cozy, I noticed that her hands were trembling a little. I wondered to myself if she was a little nervous, or just starting to get old.