The Correspondence Artist

by Barbara Browning

  When I checked in at Le Djenné, the receptionist told me that M. Kouyaté hadn’t yet checked into his room but that it was the one next door to mine. That was okay – I wanted to freshen up anyway. I didn’t text him right away. I figured he was with the kids and I wanted to respect his time with them. I took a long lukewarm shower and rubbed some lotion into my skin. I was hungry but I figured I’d wait for Djeli so we could get some dinner together. I got dressed.

  By 8:30 I was getting really famished. I’d been distractedly reading Petals of Blood but I kept stopping to check the BlackBerry. I was starting to get a little pissed off. I told the receptionist to tell Djeli when he got in that I’d gone out to get something to eat. Things were just starting to warm up in the neighborhood. Nightlife in Bamako gets going on the late side. I wandered over to the Bar Bla Bla, which looked like one of the livelier spots in the quartier. There was a motley assortment of Rastas and Peace Corps types. I figured I wouldn’t stand out, particularly. I took a table in the corner and ordered the capitaine brochettes with a Coke.

  There was a couple making out near the bathroom. He had her pressed up against the wall and their kisses looked very sweet. She was fat and pretty, and he was very skinny. She smiled a lot between their kisses. Djeli and I never kiss in public.

  My fish was very good.

  When I got back to the hotel, Djeli still hadn’t appeared. I tried to read some more, and when that didn’t work, I tried pretending to be trying to sleep. Then I got up, stripped down to my black lace panties, and posed in several provocative positions for myself in the full-length mirror. I looked pretty good.

  Then I tried to read some more.

  I finally gave in at 1 a.m. and texted Djeli the following message : “donne-moi un signe de vie.” I checked the BlackBerry fairly obsessively for the next hour, then cried for about five minutes, brushed my teeth, washed off my make-up, put on some moisturizer, turned out the light, and got in bed. I have some vague recollection of irritably swatting at a mosquito buzzing around my ear shortly before I drifted off.

  Djeli, meanwhile, was snoozing in a first class seat on an airplane flying toward Charles de Gaulle International Airport. Issa and Farka were by his side, out cold. Mariam had thought he was overreacting, but as he had written me (though I hadn’t read it), he just thought it would be better to have them in Paris until the outbreak was under control. And as he’d also written me, even if he couldn’t be stroking my pussy on his bed at Le Djenné as we’d planned, he’d be in Paris before I knew it. He’d already asked Ama to make up the guestroom for me.

  Monday, October 22, 2007, 10:47 p.m.

  Subject: how to change the subject

  Well, that’s a funny way to make the “conversation seem finished : it’s about the clitoris and the vagina.” It finishes like this? I have to wait until November 1st to respond in person?

  I went to see a brilliant play by an Israeli playwright, Hanoch Levin. “Krum.” A Polish theater company, TR Warszawa. It gave you the impression that Polish people are extremely sexy, smart and ironic.

  I’m just changing the topic to the theater in order to stop thinking about my clitoris and vagina.

  This was so typical of Tzipi. I guess I started it. I’d sent her three little webcam photos of me masturbating while reading an e-mail she’d sent. They didn’t show my head. Whenever I send dirty pictures to the paramour, I always leave them headless. It just seems like a good idea, considering how digital information travels. So these pictures were low-resolution, at an awkward angle, entirely home-made – and for this reason very sexy, if I say so myself. Tzipi didn’t say anything about them. She just sent some kind of political tirade, which is sometimes what she does when she’s aroused. I knew that’s what was going on. So I wrote her, “I’m not even going to ask you what you thought of my pictures. I’m going to take that politically incorrect subject heading of yours as an indication of your arousal, because that’s the way you are.” She wrote back saying that my pictures made her very aroused. And that she wanted to talk with me about masturbation.

  All of this was just a week and a half before we’d be seeing each other again. I asked her if she wanted to have this conversation when we saw each other, or if she wanted to have it on the internet, which was, as far as I could tell, created precisely for this kind of thing. We started having the conversation in our correspondence. I reminded her of an e-mail I’d once sent her about coming with my two fingers inside myself, imagining what she’d be feeling if my fingers were her fingers. She wrote back that she remembered that e-mail very well, and she loved it, and she had a question for me, but that she’d really rather talk about it than write about it. But she said, “Just to make the conversation seem finished: it’s about the clitoris and the vagina.”

  And I kind of sort of changed the subject to the Polish theater company. Of course the conversation wasn’t finished at all.

  Tzipi wrote again, telling me a beautiful story about standing and looking at herself in the mirror when she was a little girl, and being aroused by her own tiny breasts and long hair, and imagining a little penis rising between her legs. This image reminded me of those magical drawings by Henry Darger, of little warrior girls with penises. I sent her a couple of photographs of these drawings. She seemed to like them. And then she made those interesting comments about reflexivity, and reflexive verbs in Romance languages, and masturbation. Of course, it wasn’t “fellation” she shrugged off, but the “estimulation” of the G-spot, an anatomical invention she found highly suspect. I thought maybe this was a generational difference. I can tell you, with her two fingers inside of me, I know she’s touched mine. She’s willing to acknowledge that breasts are sensitive, that lips are sensitive, that all kinds of touch can be sensual, but she insists that female orgasm is almost inevitably linked to clitoral stimulation. Sometimes she’ll go after mine – or her own – with a concentration bordering on hostility. Sometimes I’ll grab her fingers and look into her eyes, and guide her to touch me with more delicacy. But the truth is, my erotic bond with Tzipi is so strong, even though we seem to disagree about some things in bed, I always come with her, immediately and repeatedly, and I always want more. Every time I’m near her I want to be touching her.

  She says her fingers inside me are for her, not for me. She says she’s imagining her cock deep inside of me. Sometimes when I send her dirty pictures, or messages about sex, she’ll tell me I’ve given her a hard-on. Tzipi often refers to her own sexual excitation in masculine terms. Actually, sometimes I do that myself. In fact, I just got my own hard-on thinking about Tzipi’s.

  I’m not sure what she talks about with her analyst. I imagine they’ve discussed the mirror stage. It makes perfect sense, of course, that she sees a Lacanian. And yet I can’t help but wonder sometimes if this is the best approach, from a therapeutic perspective. Because one of the things that seems to preoccupy her most is the sad truth of that infinite chain of signifiers – the infinite replaceability of her lovers. She’s fundamentally a very committed person. Her love for Asher is profound. She still loves Hannah, in spite of everything. Pitzi too, of course. She’s a dedicated friend to her circle of progressive and sensitive intellectuals. She’s taken risks to defend them. But she’s a very seductive person, and even though she complains on occasion about the bother or even terror of men and women falling in love with her, she can’t really resist seducing them.

  Especially young people. Now there’s a little something for the analyst to chew on.

  In this respect, Tzipi bears an uncanny resemblance to Simone de Beauvoir. There are a lot of stories about both her and Sartre. Of course she kind of told one of them herself in She Came to Stay. You know, the young woman they seduced and shared and then belittled wrote a pretty bitter response herself. There are also some rumors about the adopted daughter who published the letters. This is one reason I wonder about her assertion that she was “carrying out her mother’s will” when she published her letters to Algren
with all the embarrassing orthographic and grammatical errors she’d expressly said she wanted excised. Anyway, I can’t say I’m sorry the letters were published this way.

  In January of 1948, Simone de Beauvoir wrote to Algren a description of a New Year’s party she’d been to. There was a charming fifteen-year-old girl there, and Simone describes the way she danced. She says that she imagines that if she were a man, she’d be a “very wicked” one because she’d surely take great pleasure in seducing and making love to young girls, and then she’d dump them immediately because they’d begin to get on her nerves. She says, “I feel there is both something appealing and something nauseating in very young girls.”

  This is precisely Tzipi’s feeling about that “beautiful, dumb Thai girl.” Of course, Simone de Beauvoir didn’t need to be a “very wicked man” to seduce and dump a lot of beautiful young people. She managed just fine as a woman.

  Do I sound bitter myself? I don’t feel bitter – and I certainly can’t claim to be an ingénue. When I met Tzipi I’d been around the block. Although she’s twenty-three years older than me, I’m at the antique end of her spectrum. And I’m not dumb. Even Tzipi’s acknowledged that. I went into this with my eyes wide open, and she’s been honest with me every step of the way.

  I told you, I have no idea why I got a little reckless with my emotions with her, when I’d managed to be so self-contained with the paramour.

  I’ve been listening to that beautiful Bill Evans album, Conversations with Myself. Maybe you can see why this album interests me. It was considered very innovative when he recorded it in 1963, but also a little gimmicky. Evans laid down one solo piano track, and then laid down another on top of that, and then a third. Technically, it’s very virtuosic. I mean his piano technique – the recording technique was really just piping these three tracks through a left, a right, and a middle channel. It sounds best if you have your speakers arranged far apart so you get that illusion of spatiality.

  The most lyrical song on the album is the “Love Theme from Spartacus.” In fact, if I were to choose a song to represent my love affair with Tzipi, it would be this song. I know that sounds pretty tacky. The theme song from a cheesy old movie with Kirk Douglas played on a gimmicky three-track album. But if you listen to it, you’ll see what I mean. And Spartacus, of course, isn’t just cheesy. It’s actually kind of great. I watched it recently and at several moments I got tears in my eyes. It’s not the love story, of course, that’s moving. That part is pretty banal. It’s the politics of it. It’s so interesting that the first slave who sacrifices himself in order to make a statement about the brutality of slavery is a black man. That self-sacrifice is what politicizes Kirk Douglas, and turns him into a great revolutionary figure. There’s the whole gay subplot with Tony Curtis (Laurence Olivier’s “body slave”). And then there’s the amazing scene when the soldiers come to the camp of rebel slaves and say they’ll kill everyone unless Spartacus gives himself up. Kirk Douglas, of course, steps forward, chin first: “I am Spartacus.” And then one by one, each of his comrades in arms also steps forth, willing to sacrifice himself for the higher cause. “I am Spartacus.” “I am Spartacus.” “I am Spartacus.”

  But the song, “Love Theme from Spartacus,” the way that Bill Evans plays it, isn’t dramatic this way. What’s beautiful about it, the reason I find it so à propos of my relationship with Tzipi, is that it begins so lush and sentimental, so tender, ultra-sensitive – and then it changes character entirely and becomes funny, bebop, clever, sexy, playful. I get sentimental over Tzipi, but she’s so smart that however cruel or hard-headed or selfish she can be, in the end I always find myself smiling at her virtuosity.

  She wrote me about a month ago about a twenty-one-year-old couple she’d met at a reading she gave at Tel Aviv University with Tanya Reinhart. Afterwards she took the young couple home with her and the three of them had sex – she and the boy took turns working on his girlfriend. She said they were both beautiful and intelligent, and that this encounter was “very important.” But she hasn’t said anything about them since then.

  In the “Seminar” on Poe, Lacan asks this interesting question: “For a purloined letter to exist, we may ask, to whom does a letter belong?” He notes that there are certain situations in which the sender might reasonably feel some proprietary rights regarding the letter which he’s written, even if he sends it to the recipient, ostensibly, as a gift. Clearly, there are both legal and ethical ramifications to this observation which spring to mind. But Lacan is more interested in the psychological ramifications. This is related to that complicated assertion that “a letter always arrives at its destination,” even if the recipient never gets it. Because, as Lacan suggests, it may well be that the person to whom the letter was addressed was never “the real receiver.”

  I thought a lot about this while I was reading Simone de Beauvoir’s correspondence with Nelson Algren, and not reading Nelson Algren’s correspondence with Simone de Beauvoir.

  Monday, October 29, 2007, 9:59 a.m.

  Subject: Darger

  Good morning. Today I’m sending you the beautiful pictures by Henry Darger. Henry Darger was a crazy person who lived alone and secretly wrote a book that was 15,000 pages long. They found it when he was dying. He made thousands of pictures to illustrate the story. He would copy drawings of little girls out of magazine advertisements, and he gave them all penises and testicles. Half the time they were naked.

  The story is full of action and kind of frightening. The girls have to fight a lot of battles. You can see, some of the drawings are very violent. Anyway, I thought of these girls when you wrote about looking at yourself in the mirror, and the penis you imagined popping out.

  And that made me remember Freud’s essay, “A Child Is Being Beaten,” which is about a very typical fantasy construct of girls. First the girl fantasizes that another child, often her brother or sister, is being beaten by the father. Freud says this is a way for her to fantasize that she is loved exclusively, or best, by the father. Then the fantasy becomes masochistic : she is the one being beaten herself. The fantasy is often accompanied by masturbation. The girl usually forgets this middle phase of the fantasy (it is shameful), and ends with a more abstract but sexually exciting sense that “a child is being beaten” – not her, nor a brother or sister, just “a child.”

  Feminist psychoanalytic theorists like this essay because they say it’s one of the places where Freud suggests that one’s gender identification can slip and change. The masturbatory fantasy of the girl is linked to her shifting identification with the child-figures who move from boy to girl and back again.

  Speaking of Freud, and penises, I learned a new dirty expression: “smoking a Cuban.” It means giving a blow-job with the active use of both hands. Of course when I heard that it made me think of you, and that photograph on your desk of you and Harry Mathews smoking Cubans in the marché des enfants rouges.

  Last night I went with Florence to see Karen Finley perform. Do you know who she is? She became very famous because in the 1990s conservative politicians here protested the fact that she received government funds to produce work they found “obscene” (there were 3 other artists implicated but she was the most talked-about because of something involving yams). It went all the way to the Supreme Court and they ended up taking away the funding. And then she was very famous for being obscene.

  She is obscene. She is also fantastic and beautiful and sexual, and hysterical in the fullest sense of the term, and frightening and funny and deeply sad. I was very moved.

  It’s getting colder, but it’s nice: crisp, with a very blue sky. I think it will be like this when you get to Boston.

  xoxo

  Tzipi was going to give a talk at Harvard and she invited me up to stay at the hotel with her for two nights. As usual, she’d booked us adjoining rooms. As I said, she liked those pictures by Darger that I sent her. But she wasn’t particularly interested in the business about Freud. Even though she’s in analys
is, it really bothers her when I start in with my Freudian mallet. And she has no patience at all for French feminist theory about the slippery slope of gender identity. Of course Tzipi considers herself a feminist, but it’s hard to say what that means, exactly. Her politics are very unpredictable.

  In one of her letters to Algren, Simone de Beauvoir makes some reference to the fact that he didn’t identify as a Jew, or that he acknowledged being Jewish but in a strange way, and the editor explained that in an interview he had said jokingly that he was a “Swedish Jew,” which was his way of saying that technically he was both of these things but that he didn’t really identify as either. This was funny, because when Tzipi was very young, that actress Tippi Hedren was very popular, and Tzipi used to joke that she was going to change her name to Tzipi Hedren, because she thought she was really Swedish. Because of her very public position on Palestine, a lot of people have accused Tzipi of being a “self-hating Jew.” She’s not, of course. She’s just a Swedish Jew. I’m not sure what kind of feminist she is.