by Chris Kraus
I never told you about last night at Claire and David’s. David said the most subtle and intelligent thing about Arnold Schoenberg: When the form’s in place, everything within it can be pure feeling. It’s true of them as much as of atonal music. They are the perfect hosts from a world I’ve only read about, where having dinner is a kind of temporal art. They’re so cultured and intelligent, not nasty-smart but still provocative, drawing people out so that by the time the coffee’s served you feel like something has—occurred.
But now it’s time to get up and make one last effort here with Bruce and Betsey.
Love,
Chris
Thurman, NY
Friday, December 30, 1994: 10 a.m.
Dear Dick,
Sylvère has taken Mimi to the vet & I’m alone & want to bring you up to date on what happened yesterday at Bruce and Betsey’s.
Things got better. Betsey and I made pancakes while Sylvère and Bruce talked Marcel Mauss and Durkheim. Betsey’s studying to be a curator and we talked about her work. She’s already quite professional because she was careful not to commit herself by expressing any interest in my work. And then we ate and took a walk along the river. Outside the house Betsey and Bruce seemed more relaxed. Four deer ran across the towpath. We froze. I started liking them.
Then we walked over to another, 19th-century house that Bruce and Betsey bought at auction after it’d been repossessed. They joked about the pathetic former owner, a chainsmoking 50-year-old spinster who lived alone and made a living as a “commercial writer.” Of course I identified immediately. Betsey’d more or less cleared out the mess except for a few crateloads of trashy paperback romances. How odd. Perhaps these were books the “commercial writer” wrote? At any rate, Sylvère and I were ecstatic. Didn’t their titles perfectly describe my feelings? We’d found the missing clue.
Here are the titles of some books we took from Bruce and Betsey’s:
Second Chance At Love—Halfway There
Second Chance At Love—Passion’s Song
Second Chance At Love—A Reckless Longing
Research Into Marriage
Wife In Exchange
Beyond Her Control
All Else Confusion
Bruce and Betsey seemed puzzled and bemused but I don’t think they connected it with you. On the car ride home I started reading Research Into Marriage, then underlining, footnoting and annotating all the passages that could relate to me and you. It’s an exercise both adolescent (me!) and academic (you!)…my first art object, which I’ll give you as a present.
Later when I asked Sylvère why we like you so much better than Bruce and Betsey, he said: Because Dick is sensitive. I think that’s true. Bruce and Betsey are undeserving of your loyalty.
Dick, all the work in the house is going to start this afternoon, so I’d better get ready for it. But I keep you in my heart, it keeps me going.
Love,
Chris
December 31, 1994
On New Year’s Eve Sylvère and Chris had dinner at Bernardo’s with Tad and Pam, his ex-biker girlfriend. Chris had always liked, admired, Pam—her life story, her interests and her art aspirations. Over drinks Pam told them how much she “hated” Chris’ movie, “although,” she said “I’m still thinking about it.” Chris wondered what it was in her appearance or her character that made people think they could say these things. As if she had no feelings. Earlier that day she’d felt awful, haggling with David about the price of windows that she’d offered to buy upstate and transport to a Bridgehampton barn he was renovating. David offered her 500 bucks. Well, no—that was way too little—would she spend two days on someone else’s windows if she didn’t need the money? In five minutes David called back, offering to pay double and Chris was stunned. Buy cheap sell dear. She didn’t expect these laws to apply between two friends. She felt the same as when she’d let some guy feel her tits for 50 bucks at the Wild West Topless Bar, then learned Brandi always held out for 100.
That night Sylvère and Chris had faltering sex. He was upset, confused, not knowing where or who he was. Crestline-Paris-East Hampton and now Thurman. In three weeks he’d be in New York again: a new semester, another seven years of teaching. Considering Thurman as their “home” was a provisional delusion like everything else in his life with Chris. The house wasn’t Leonard Woolf’s estate in southern England—it was a woodframe rural slum, trashed by a family of deadbeat hicks who they’d evicted before Christmas. Now they were painting, cleaning, and in three weeks they’d be gone again. What kind of life could they believe in? What kind of life could they afford?
In the early hours of the New Year Chris wrote to Dick:
“I don’t know where I am and the only reality is moving. Soon I’ll have to deal with the reality of this expensive, unlikeable movie, the fact I don’t have a job. You moved to California because Europe was so claustrophobic. You cleared the junk out of your life…is it possible for you to understand this kind of freefall? Virilio’s right—speed and transience negate themselves, become inertia.
You’re shrunk and bottled in a glass jar, you’re a portable saint. Knowing you’s like knowing Jesus. There are billions of us and only one of you so I don’t expect much from you personally. There are no answers to my life. But I’m touched by you and fulfilled just by believing.”
Love,
Chris
New Year’s Sunday was another sad and melancholy day. Gray-black fog hung around all afternoon ’til finally darkness crept in around 4:30. Sylvère and Chris stayed in bed ’til noon, talking, drinking coffee, then finally got up to take a drive. A flock of crows perched on the bare trees beside the farm on River Road. The countryside seemed dismal. For once, Chris understood the world of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. She was chilled by all this “charming” ancient squalor. Driving past the cabins, logging stumps and farmhouses, Chris felt the claustrophobia of a life among people who lived here 50 years ago, several to a room, afraid of freezing, starving, afraid that one of them will catch a contagious and incurable disease. People who’d never been to Albany let alone New York or Montreal. An Incredible String Band cassette was playing in the car—a traditional ballad called Job’s Tears about winter, death and heaven.
We’ll understand it better in the sweet bye and bye
You won’t need to worry and you won’t need to cry
Over in the old Golden Land
Don’t you see why the people here actually looked forward to dying? A fellow schoolteacher’d told her once how all the gingerbread on the houses here—the stars, the crescent moons—were patterned on Masonic symbols. Clearly the people felt themselves in need of some protection. And how did The Incredible String Band, four attractive hippies in their 20s, ever manage to locate the desperation behind rural folk religion? Maybe they just thought the songs were pretty.
Chris considered using her studio visits at Art Center to testify about Dick, exhorting all the students there to write to him. “It will change your life!” She’d write a crazy tract called I Love Dick and publish it in Sylvère’s school magazine. Hadn’t her entire art career been this unprofessional?
Sylvère and Chris walked a little way towards Pharaoh Lake, got cold, went home, had tea and sex and took a nap. Then they got up and started the long job of unpacking boxes.
They spent the next week at the house with Tad and Pam, installing new old windows, cherry floors and tearing down partitions.
EXHIBIT M: SCENES OF PROVINCIAL LIFE
Thurman, New York
Thursday, January 5, 1995: 10:45 p.m.
Dear Dick,
Tonight we went to the Thurman Town Court as plaintiffs against our former tenants, the O’Malley’s, sandwiched in between the bad check writers and drunk drivers. This should pretty much evoke for you the world we live in. We can’t imagine you in that position. Actually we can hardly imagine ourselves there. When it was all over and we won, we both agreed we couldn’t care less about material possessions. We
were just sick of being had all the time by everyone, even these stupid hicks who we sued for non-payment of rent, and who will eventually get the better of us. Oh Dick, I wish you were here to save us from life in the provinces.
Signed,
Charles and Emma Bovary
The next day, Friday January 6, (Epiphany) Chris drove to Corinth to replace some broken glass in a medicine chest. She felt totally attuned to this upstate January day…dazzling ice and snow turned scrunchy from the cold, Corinth’s army of welfare clients, former mental patients and the semi-self-employed walking around town, settling into four more months of winter. She loved the way the clouds turned pink in the afternoon and noticed how the season changed, the subtle shifts that made January different from December. She worried a bit about running into her ex-boyfriend Marshall Blonsky at Joseph Kosuth’s birthday party two weeks from Saturday, though really she was looking forward to it. “My first party in New York where I don’t give a shit,” she confided to Dick. “I’m looking forward to the future so long as you are in it.” Does this mean she was happy?
Sylvère and Chris bumbled around the construction site that was their house “helping” Tad and Pam, non-Jews who mistook their constant screaming at each other for hostility. Maija, their apartment subletter in New York phoned to say she’d decided to stop paying rent.
Both of them assumed Dick was out of town for the holidays. They were trying to figure out their next move. One afternoon Sylvère called his friend Marvin Dietrichson in LA to try and get a read on Dick’s reaction. And yes, before the Christmas break, Marvin’d run into Dick in the school hall and said: “I heard you saw Sylvère and Chris—How’d it go?” “I don’t know,” Marvin recalled Dick saying, “it was some strange scene.”
Some strange scene. When Chris heard this her stomach contracted and she vomited. Was this really all it was? “Some strange scene?” Was there any way of reaching Dick beyond the filters of Sylvère and Marvin?
Crohn’s Disease is a hereditary chronic inflammation of the small intestine. Like any chronic ailment its triggers can be physical, psychic or environmental. For Chris the trigger was despair, which she saw as very different from depression. Despair was being backed into a corner without a single move. Despair began with a contracting, swelling of the small intestine which in turn created an obstruction which in turn caused vomiting beyond bile. This obstruction was accompanied by abdominal pain so overwhelming she could only lie beneath it, waiting for the onset of high fevers, dehydration. The pain was like a roller coaster: once it reached a certain point she was strapped in for a ride which inevitably took her to the hospital for sedation, intravenous drugs and fluids.
Sylvère’d become an expert at tricking the disease. All it took to stop the rollercoaster was to calm Chris down and make her sleep. Cups of tea with liquid opium, fluffy dogs and stories.
That afternoon Sylvère brought Chris a pen and writing pad. “Here,” he said. “Let’s write to Dick.” This made her sicker. So then he stroked her hair and made some tea and told a story about their dead dog Lily, the one they’d loved who’d died a year ago of cancer, his words tracing a perimeter around a sadness so unspeakable and huge that they both cried.
Chris fell asleep and Sylvère retreated back into “his” room, the master bedroom. Since arriving from Long Island they stayed in separate rooms for the first time in ten years. “A very democratic arrangement,” Sylvère noted resentfully. Chris had said something about needing privacy…the better to share her thoughts with Dick? But even with Chris occupying the northwest room with the sloping saltbox roof and tiny windows and Sylvère in the big east bedroom that overlooked the pond there were still four others empty. Room for the orphan, room for the pony trainer/caretaker, room for the nanny…an entire cast of characters who’d never quite arrived to share this Edwardian fantasy.
Chris’ sickness was what had originally ensnared him twelve or thirteen years ago. Not the physical signs of it—dull hair, strange bruises, blue marks on her legs and thighs. He’d found these quite repulsive. “Usually the girls that I go out with are better dressed and better looking,” Bataille’d reported of his meetings with the philosopher Simone Weil. And truly, unlike Sylvère’s many other girlfriends, Chris’ body didn’t offer any pleasure. It wasn’t blonde or opulent; dark, voluptuous—it was thin and nervous, bony. And while Chris was obviously intelligent, even unusually cultivated, Sylvère knew plenty of smart men. And at that time he had all New York to choose from. All through the year that they met, Sylvère kept her at a distance, rarely asking her to spend the night. What he liked was lunch-time sex followed by some disembodied philosophic talk…this always helped to get her out the door.
It wasn’t ’til that summer when David Rattray called him to report that Chris was in a Minneapolis hospital that Sylvère realized Chris’ sickness could have anything to do with him: that by accepting her he could save her life. The rest was history, or, Chris had gotten one thing right: beneath his reputation at the Mudd Club as the philosopher of kinky sex, Sylvère was a closet humanist. Guilt and duty more than S&M propelled his life.
But now in her infatuation, Chris’ body had filled out, become so sexual. She was attenuated and available. Curled up in bed in a floral satin robe, staring through ruffled curtains across the snowy road to Baker’s Garage and junkyard, she looked a little like Elizabeth Barrett Browning without the spaniel in Virginia Woolf ’s Flush, a book Sylvère’d talked about in England thirty years ago with Vita Sackville-West.
Early in the evening Chris got up and went to Sylvère’s room. “I’m not going to get sick. You stopped it.” And then she took a bath and Sylvère sat beside her near the tub the way they used to do. Sitting there, Sylvère watched glimpses of her body melting in the water, one elbow raised, tips of breasts piercing the surface of the water, the dense net of pubic hair. Piles of snow outside matched the paleness of her body. As she reaches for a towel white curves meshed against the snowbanks on the hill beyond the window. Hot water steamed over the bathtub and the wind outside lifted up the snow as if in steamy clouds. As if there was no difference now between cold and hot, in and out.
Then they lay down on the mattress in Sylvère’s room and started fucking. This time it’s real, a spontaneous rush of tenderness and desire, and when it’s over they rest and start again and neither of them talk.
EXHIBIT N: SYLVÈRE THANKS DICK FOR HIS NEW-FOUND SEXUALITY
Thurman, New York
Thursday, January 12, 1995
Dear Dick,
This is Charles Bovary. Emma and I have been living together for some nine years. Everyone knows what this entails. Passion becomes tenderness, tenderness turns soft. Sex collapses into warm intimacy. We could spend months without, and whenever we did it became short and interrupted. Was it desire that had left me? Or maybe the fragility that comes with closeness, I don’t know. The main result was that I never had anymore those glorious hard-ons of yore.
Emma often suggested I should see a sex therapist. You could tell there was something pleasing to her about this idea, sending the old white male to the repair shop after years of gradually dismantling his most instinctive habits.
Over the years, Emma had become very keen on transforming my sexuality, which had been so celebrated in New York, into something less Foucauldian and controlling into a more restrained submissive dick-dwindling kind of thing. And I concurred. Emma and I set out to challenge centuries of male supremacy and dickdom. I lay there, more passive than women were supposed to be, waiting for Emma to overwhelm me with her hard dick of desire. But soon she grew dissatisfied. I wasn’t responding. (I never found her advances heartfelt enough.) And so began the gradual detumescence of my once glorious erections.
Sex became short and somewhat wobbly. Emma, at first thrilled by the project, grew impatient with my bumbling impulses. We had sex rarely, pretended it didn’t matter. Our friendship strengthened, our love increased and sex was sublimated to more worthy social en
deavors: art, careers, property. Still, occasionally the troubling thought surfaced that a couple without sex is hardly a couple at all. It’s at this point, Dick, after we’d convinced ourselves that a life without sex was a better life, that you entered our lives like an angel of mercy.
At first Emma’s crush on you was a blow to what remained of my self-esteem (and it’s thanks to you that I am willing to admit that self-esteem exists and matters; can one be American without it?). Our sexuality invested itself in a new erotic activity: writing to you, Dick. And isn’t every letter a love letter? Since I was writing to you, Dick, I was writing love letters. What I didn’t know was that by writing love letters I was writing letters to love, and timidly reawakening all the dormant powers in my rather repressed emotions.
This is a long story, Dick, and you’re the only one who I can tell it to. Emma’s love for you was the final blow to my sexuality. I always knew that however much we denied sex it would one day show its ugly head again, like a snake, and in a sense you were that snake, Dick. Here was a time, my friend, of tabula rasa: no desire, no future, no sex. But paradoxically this defeat opened up a new set of possibilities—that Emma, who for so long had been disinterested in sex, was now fantasizing about your prick, Dick, raised the possibility of renewal. If there are Dicks somewhere, there might be dick for us.
