I Love Dick
Page 5
At midnight they transmit the fax. They go to bed but Chris can’t sleep, feeling like she’s compromised herself. Around 2 she slips into her office and scrawls the Secret Fax.
EXHIBIT F: THE SECRET FAX
Dear Dick, The idée fixe behind the tempest was that I’d like to see you Wednesday night after Sylvère leaves for Paris. I’d still like to do this. If you fax me yes or no after 7a.m. Wednesday I’ll get your message privately.
Chris
She punches in Dick’s fax number, index finger hovering over SEND. But something stops her and she goes back to bed.
December 12, 1994
This morning as they lie in bed drinking coffee Chris says nothing to Sylvère about the Secret Fax. Instead she wonders about the difference in the prefix numbers in Dick’s fax and phone lines. Tiny wisps of doubt gather into a thunderhead. When she checks the numbers in Sylvère’s notebook she shouts: “Oh my God! We sent the fax to Dick at school!” (Curiously, Dick’s school has only one fax machine. It’s in the President’s office. The President was a nice man, a Jewish liberal scholar married to a friendly acquaintance of Chris’ from New York. Just two weeks ago, the four had spent a warm and animated evening at the President’s home…)
The situation is now so globally embarrassing there’s no choice but to phone Dick and alert him to the arrival of the fax. Miraculously, Sylvère reaches Dick on the first call. This time he doesn’t tape the conversation. Chris hides her head underneath the pillows. Sylvère returns, triumphant. Dick was gruff, annoyed, Sylvère reports, but at least we’ve headed off disaster. Chris sees him as a hero. She’s so in awe of Sylvère’s bravery she spontaneously confesses all about the Secret Fax.
And now Sylvère can’t avoid the reality of this anymore. This is not another coffee-game they’ve invented. HIS WIFE LOVES ANOTHER MAN. Upset, betrayed, he writes a story.
EXHIBIT G: SYLVÈRE’S STORY
INFIDELITY
Chris thought a lot about deceiving her husband. She’d never understood the comedies of Marivaux, all that sneaking around behind closed doors, but now the logic of deception dawned. She’d just had sex with Sylvère (who thanked Dick afterwards) and Sylvère expressed his deep undying love for her. Wasn’t time ripe for betrayal?
Because in a sense, the story had to end this way. Isn’t it what Sylvère intended, really, when he practically forced Chris to write “The Intelligent Fax”?
Sylvère and Chris had been together for ten years, and she fanta-sized confessing her adulterous virginity to Dick—“You’re the first.” Now the only way to get what she wanted (age 40 looming fast) without hurting Sylvère’s feelings was to sneak. Sylvère also longed for an elegant conclusion to this adventure; didn’t the form dictate that Chris end up in Dick’s arms? And it would end there. Dick and Chris wouldn’t need to ever do this again; Sylvère would never have to know.
But Sylvère couldn’t help thinking Chris had betrayed the form they’d both invented by excluding him.
[And here Chris picks up the story, hoping to make Sylvère understand—]
Chris thought she was acting valiantly on her and Sylvère’s behalf. Didn’t someone have to bring the story to a close? Driving up North Road this afternoon, Chris felt she understood Emma Bovary’s situation very well. The lonely move from Crestline looming; the drive across America. Three starved coyotes stood along the road. Chris thought about Emma’s sensitive Italian Greyhound running farther from the coach towards certain doom. All is lost.
[Together, they continue—]
Ever since Sylvère’s brave phone call that morning to a justifiably annoyed Dick, they realized they’d be hanging together now. Dick would never answer. The form would never be fulfilled. Sylvère would never be offered a job at Dick’s school.
Sylvère pretended not to mind. Hadn’t he and Chris behaved like true patricians, i.e., reckless lunatics? Would anyone else have dared to put someone in Dick’s position through such a trip? We’re artists, Sylvère said. So we’re allowed.
But Chris was not so sure.
Eventually they would subtitle this Does the Epistolary Genre Mark the Advent of the Bourgeois Novel? But that was later, after another dinner with some noted academic friends at Dick’s.
Crestline, California
Monday, December 12, 1994
Dear Dick,
I, we’re, writing you this letter that we will never send. Finally we’ve figured out what the problem is: you think we’re dilettantes. Why didn’t we realize it before? I mean, Dick, you’re a simple guy. You don’t have time for the likes of us. You’re like all the other boyfriends, guys, who’d confess proudly after shagging me regularly for six months, a year: “I’ve met someone. I really like her. Karen-Sharon-Heather-Barbara’s not like you. She is a truly nice person.” Well. Are we not Nice People in your eyes?
Is it a class thing? Even though we share your background, you think we’re decadent sophisticates. That we are somehow…insincere.
What now? Were we wrong in trying to be close to you? Here are some events from the background of our lives:
We’re leaving California, moving house for about the hundredth time in the last two years. Anxiety’s become routine.
Chris got a letter today from Berlin: her film will not be in the Festival.
Chris received several faxes full of bad news, hidden costs, delays, from the post-production coordinator in New Zealand.
These events took us off the Dick Track for a while and we were so relieved to get back on it in a house already packed away.
Then Sylvère got a call from Margit Rowell, Drawing Curator at the MOMA. Would he like to edit a catalogue on Antonin Artaud? It’s an important exhibition. The gap between us widens. Then the cleaning women showed up followed by the Carpet Shampoo man. Chris paced between everyone, frantic about your reaction to her fax.
Dick, why are we so bored with our lives? Yesterday we decided not to take this house again next summer. Perhaps we’ll rent one on the other edge of your town?
Do you attract this kind of energy? Are we like the famous burglar who enters people’s homes to steal small talismans—a pack of condoms, a cheese knife?
We can’t bring ourselves to finish this letter.
Signed,
Chris & Sylvère
10:55 p.m.
We’re thinking about calling Dick again to tell him that the video was a half-baked idea. This is how delirium works: we’re laughing and excited and at this moment it makes perfect sense for us to call. After all, Dick’s been “with” us for the past two hours. We’re forgetting Dick never wants to hear from us again. Calling now would be the final straw.
Writing this has been like moving through a kaleidoscope of all our favorite books in history: Swann’s Way and Willam Congreve, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert. Does analogy make emotion less sincere?
Time heals all wounds.
Dick, you’re so intelligent but we live in different cultures. Sylvère and I are like the Ladies of the Heian Court in 5th century Japan. Love challenges us to express ourselves elegantly and ambiguously. But meanwhile you were Back at the Ranch.
Billets Doux; Billets Dick: A Cultural Study.
We put you to the test; we failed.
December 13, 1994
Tuesday dawns in disappointment. Sylvère and Chris spend the day moving things into Locker #26 at the Dart Canyon Storage Bins. For $25 a month they can postpone discarding their broken wicker chair, sagging double beds and thrift store couch forever. Chris hauls the furniture from the truck upstairs to Level 2 alone while Sylvère barks instructions. Because he has a plastic hip he can’t lift anything heavier than a Petit Larousse, but he does consider himself an expert packer/mover. By the third trip it’s completely clear that their stuff won’t fit into Locker #26, a 4x8 enclosure. For 15 dollars more they could’ve had Bin #14, an ample 10x12, but Sylvère won’t hear of it, these unnecessary expenses. I’m very organized! he cries (just as concentration camp survivors boasted about thei
r ability to “organize” a smuggled egg or contraband potato). He keeps re-visioning how to stack the floor lamps, mattresses, 300 pounds of books and Chris is screaming at him, sagging under the weight of all this shit, (You Cheap Jew!) as she drags junk out of Bin #26 to the hall and back again. This makes him even more determined. But finally it all fits when they agree to throw away the gilded cage they’d bought in Colton at the Pets’R’Us liquidation sale for 30 bucks, a bargain. The bird had long since flown away. Driving back through Ensenada at the end of their cheap and dusty impromptu vacation in Baja last September, they’d bought a small green conure parrot on the roadside, hiding it under the carseat when they drove across the border. Loulou—they’d named it for Félicité’s pet in Flaubert’s A Simple Heart—had been Sylvère’s Bird Correlative. He fed it lettuce leaves and seeds, confided to it, tried to teach it words. But one sunny autumn day he left the cage door open on the deck so Loulou could get a better view of the freshly snow-capped peaks above Lake Gregory. As he watched, astonished and then quickly broken-hearted, Loulou flew from the birdcage to the railing to the giant pine and finally out of view. They’d bought every bird accessory but the wing-clip. “He chose freedom,” Sylvère repeated sadly.
Because most “serious” fiction, still, involves the fullest possible expression of a single person’s subjectivity, it’s considered crass and amateurish not to “fictionalize” the supporting cast of characters, changing names and insignificant features of their identities. The “serious” contemporary hetero-male novel is a thinly veiled Story of Me, as voraciously consumptive as all of patriarchy. While the hero/anti-hero explicitly is the author, everybody else is reduced to “characters.” Example: the artist Sophie Calle appears in Paul Auster’s book Leviathan in the role of writer’s girlfriend. “Maria was far from beautiful but there was an intensity in her gray eyes that attracted me.” Maria’s work is identical to Calle’s most famous pieces—the address book, hotel photos, etc.—but in Leviathan she’s a waif-like creature relieved of complications like ambition or career.
When women try to pierce this false conceit by naming names because our “I’s” are changing as we meet other “I’s,” we’re called bitches, libellers, pornographers and amateurs. “Why are you so angry?” he said to me.
There are no messages from Dick that evening on the answering machine. The house is empty, clean. After dinner Sylvère and Chris sit together on the floor and turn the laptop on.
EXHIBIT H: SYLVÈRE AND CHRIS’ LAST CRESTLINE LETTERS
Tuesday, December 13, 1994
Crestline, California
Dear Dick,
I’m leaving for France in less than 24 hours. The clock is ticking though you seem unaware of it. This is a perfect tragic space.
It’s such a bitch. This morning I felt some remorse, some empathy with you. It’s been such a persecution game. But then again when you think of all the dozens of pages written, millions of words that’ve crossed our minds about you and all we ever did was phone you twice and send one miserable fax? I mean the discrepancy is mind-blowing.
Last night we thought we had it nailed, and in a sense we do. There’s no way of communicating with you in writing because texts, as we all know, feed upon themselves, become a game. The only way left is face to face. When Chris woke up this morning I made my decision. She should go back to Antelope Valley alone and meet you, Dick.
But by the end of the afternoon I started having doubts. This morning I left a message with the President of your school thanking him for a pleasant evening. Imagine the scene: the President mentioning to you that I might join the faculty next year, Chris arriving on your doorstep just when you thought the devilish couple had flown away. What would you do? Say “Hi” or reach for your airgun? Maybe it’s not such a good idea. Let’s try another:
Chris arrives in Antelope Valley around sundown and settles in your favorite bar. She leans against the door sipping a long-necked beer and waiting for your car to drive by. Should she call your house? But she knows you’re screening calls.
Here’s another: you drive past the bar and notice that her truck is parked outside. You pull up by the bar, take your hat off and go inside. She looks up modestly across the long empty table of this cantina and sees your frame hovering in the door. The rest is history.
Scene Number Three: Chris books a room at a motel in a nearby town. She considers phoning you, decides against it, then on impulse drives to Antelope Valley and installs herself at your favorite bar. After a while she strikes up a conversation with the barman. Does he happen to know anything about this gringo living by himself on the edge of town? A nice guy, but somewhat strange? Chris fires questions at the soft Chicano cowboys who make a living keeping the undocumented Guatemalan orange pickers in line. Do they know your girlfriend? Do you have a girlfriend? Do you come here often? Do you go home alone? Do you talk? What do you say? “Whatsamatter?” the leathery-white American barkeep asks. “Are you a cop? Has he done something wrong?” “Yes,” Chris says. “He won’t return my calls.”
You see? It’s no use hiding.
So long for now,
Chris & Sylvère
Tuesday, December 13, 1994
Crestline, California
Dear Dick,
None of these ideas are right. The closest I can come to touching you (and I still want to) is to take a photo of the bar in your town. It’d be a wideshot, kind of Hopper-esque, daylight tungsten clashing with the dusky sky, a desert sunset wrapped around the stucco building, a single lightbulb hung inside…
Have you ever read The Blue of Noon by Georges Bataille? He keeps talking about chasing, missing, the Bluebird of Happiness… Oh Dick, I’m so saaaad.
Chris
Dear Dick,
I may be leaving the scene of the crime, but I can’t let it fade out into nothingness.
Sylvère
Tuesday, December 13, 1994
Crestline, California
Dear Dick,
I’m not sure I still want to fuck you. At least, not in the same way. Sylvère keeps talking about us disturbing your “fragility” but I’m not sure I agree. There’s nothing so remarkable in one more woman adoring you. It’s a “problem” you’re confronting all the time. I’m just a particularly annoying one, one who refuses to behave. That makes the picture less appealing, and I just can’t desire you anymore in that straight-up, Saturday night Some Girls kind of way. And yet I feel this tenderness towards you, after all we’ve been through. All I want’s a photo of your favorite bar. Today I phoned your colleague Marvin Dietrichson, to find out what you did today. What you said in seminar. What you were wearing. I’m finding new ways to be close to you. It’s okay, Dick, we can do the relationship your way.
Chris
Tuesday, December 13, 1994
Crestline, California
Dear Dick,
Call me persistent if you want but if you’re an artist you can’t rely on other people to do the work for you. Tomorrow night Chris is coming out to Antelope Valley.
Sylvère
And now it’s nearly 10 o’clock at night and Chris is heartbroken and Dick still hasn’t called. She knows she really won’t drive out to Dick’s house, she’ll just drive away, and she hates Sylvère for pushing her to play the fool. But thanks to Dick, Sylvère and Chris have spent the four most intense days of their lives together. Sylvère wonders if the only way that he can feel close to her is when someone else is threatening to tear them apart.
The telephone rings. Chris jumps a mile. But it wasn’t Dick, only the Dart Canyon Storage Man worrying because they’d left the locks to their storage bin open.
Should Chris call Dick? Should she rehearse it? After all, the last time she’d been taken by surprise. A single idea drifts across her mind, based on something she’d heard from Marvin Dietrichson the day before. Dick was struggling to finish writing some grant proposals for his Department before the Christmas break. That was a possible “in.” Did Dick know Chr
is had once been a professional grantwriter? That she could whip out a proposal faster than Dick could whip it out? Should she offer to help, in compensation for all this trouble? But where would they meet? In his office? In his house? In the Antelope Valley bar?
Dear Sylvère,
There has to be something to look forward to, otherwise I just can’t go on living.
Love,
Chris
Dear Chris,
From now on we’ll have Dick’s memory to cherish in everything we do. All through your trip across America we’ll exchange faxes about him. He’ll be our bridge between the Café Flores and the Texas oilfields…
Wednesday, December 14, 1994
Sylvère looked sad and tired when Chris left him with his overcoat and bags at the Palm Springs Airport. He’d fly to LAX, then JFK, then Paris while Chris finished packing up the house in Crestline. Chris stopped and bought The Best of the Ramones CD. When she got back to the house around lunchtime there were no messages from Dick but Sylvère had left one changing planes. “Hi Sweetie, I’m just calling to say goodbye again. We had a wonderful time together, it just keeps getting better and better.”
His message touched her. But later that day, talking to her neighbor’s kids, she was shocked to learn that Lori and her family were certain Sylvère was her father. Was it that obvious, even to the most casual observer, they were no longer having sex? Or did it mean that Lori, a confident assertive Black woman from LA, couldn’t fathom someone her and Chris’ age hooking up with an old wreck? Lori’s younger boyfriend was handsome, silent, mean; he was a kind of ghetto-Dick.
“Dear Dick,” Chris typed into her Toshiba laptop, “This morning the sun was coming up over the mountains as I drove Sylvère to the airport. It was another glorious California day and I thought about how different it is here from New York. A land of golden opportunity, freedom and the leisure to do—what? Become a serial killer, a Buddhist, swing, write letters to you?