The Correspondence Artist

by Barbara Browning

  I often have to laugh with Sandro, because his politics are hardly subtle. It’s better to be black than to be white. It’s better to be poor than rich, better to be gay than straight, better to be a woman than a man, better to be almost anything than American. But when I ask him if he’d really prefer to be a woman, he smiles and says that in truth, what he really loves is having a penis.

  I think Djeli feels this way too.

  Faulkner wrote that Benjy was “gelded” in 1913, after being inappropriately physically affectionate toward a passing schoolgirl, to whom he must have appeared monstrous. I realize that despite my moderation I may sometimes appear a little monstrous.

  But maybe this sounds like me again with my Freud and my mallet. Honestly, I don’t think I have penis envy. In the exchange that followed that e-mail, I told Djeli: “I love being a woman.”

  Both Sandro and Florence look at all this from a distance, and, maybe more than either Djeli or me, they actually do seem to manage to keep their bearings. That is to say, they both generously suspend judgment of either of us. I don’t go into detail with them about the political arguments. They’re aware, of course, of some of the controversies surrounding my lover, but they’re both of the opinion that life is complex and we all say questionable things on occasion.

  They also suspend judgment on some of the more questionable aspects of the ill-defined terms of my relationship with the paramour. When I do begin to squawk a little about how confusing this can be, they remind me that my lover has always been honest with me, every step of the way.

  The rest of that e-mail about the movement of the spheres went like this:

  It’s funny, all this is about being too subtle, or not being subtle enough, and about disclosure and discretion. And I ended up thinking that on a personal level, as well, with me, you were either too subtle or not subtle enough, or that you said too much or not enough about your sex life. It’s true that you talk a lot, and sometimes it’s a little hard to follow your logic. (This doesn’t bother me. The people I love the most are this way – my brother, Sandro – even me, when I start talking a lot, I sometimes find myself doing this.) I’m more of an exhibitionist than you, but you said more about sex. I’m not sure if it was too much or not enough.

  Djeli wrote back that that was an elegant formulation, and he agreed.

  Thursday, January 19, 2006, 1:08 p.m.

  Subject: fossils

  I had a long, beautiful conversation with an old friend of mine, E--- – C----. He came over for tea. He told me about an essay he wrote with a Serbian woman about love and photography. And Barthes. I told him about my sonnets, and later we exchanged work. He told me he was in Israel last year, I think for the first time. He gave a paper at the TA Museum of Art. He said, à propos of nothing, “I met Honigman.” I said, “So did I.” He said, “She has such a wonderful face.” I agreed. I don’t know if you remember meeting him. He’s a very gentle, lovely person. We talked about his obsession with mathematical theory. He’s very good at math.

  We later went to see an exhibit at the Japan Society by Hiroshi Sugimoto, a photographer and collector of old things. It was called “History of History.” My favorite part was a room of fossils. Sugimoto thinks fossils are like photographs.

  Are you happy? Are you still in London? How are your kids? Sandro’s in love with a girl named India.

  I send you a kiss.

  I’ve told almost no one about my relationship with the paramour. In fact, the only two people who really know what’s passed between us are my lover and myself. Of course, I guess you could say that about any pair of lovers. Sandro and Florence know a fair amount, and I’ve said enough to Walter that he’s probably figured it out, or thinks he has. You know, he met her briefly at that PEN reading at Cooper Union. Every once in a while I’ll find myself in an abstract conversation with someone about love, and I’ll make oblique reference to “the paramour.” But I never say who it is. I don’t do this to create an air of mystery around myself. Of course, I do have a sense of humor about the ridiculousness of this code name.

  I used to think that paramour must mean something approximating, and yet distinct from, love. I figured the etymology was probably para (next to, or beyond, as in paraphrase, or paramilitary) and amor. But it turns out it’s from the French par (by) amour. It goes straight through the heart of love. Oh well.

  Anyway, as I was saying, when I make reference to “the paramour,” I’m kind of making fun of myself. It makes it sound like I have a secret and exciting love life. I guess I do, from a certain perspective, but as you can see, in most respects it’s as stupid, awkward, and frustrating as anyone else’s. I never use any terminology that would appear to ascribe specific terms to our relationship.

  Tzipi, on the other hand, has sporadically used this kind of language in reference to me. It kind of irks me, because she never asked me if this was all right. As I told you, even when she was with Hannah she tended to be discreet about her private life. But periodically, she’ll haul off and blab to somebody about me. I didn’t worry when she told me she’d talked to Asher. He, like Sandro, has excellent judgment – much better, in fact than Tzipi. But one day she told me that Hannah had been hectoring her about me, and that she had asked Tzipi outright if I were her new “official girlfriend,” and Tzipi, in an attempt to show defiance, had responded, “Yes, if you want to put it that way, she is.”

  When I heard about this exchange, I had profoundly mixed feelings. Obviously, I was flattered that Tzipi would even momentarily promote me to this lofty status. On the other hand, I saw four potential problems: 1. the designation was Hannah’s, and Tzipi appeared to be embracing it mostly just to undermine Hannah’s control; 2. given Tzipi’s unpredictable and famously circuitous logic, this configuration could flip over at any given moment; 3. I worried, not unreasonably I think, that Hannah might come after me with a lethal weapon; and 4. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be Tzipi Honigman’s official girlfriend.

  Once she’d said it to Hannah, however, she seemed to be on a roll. Even though I protested against the “girlfriend” line in an affectionately slighting e-mail (I said I’d prefer to be called her “concubine”), she almost immediately reported that she’d referred to me by name, in a conversation with another journalist she knew only vaguely, as her “lover.” I didn’t want her to think I was resisting being outed as her sexual partner for politically objectionable reasons, but given certain aspects of our relationship, I also thought she was overstepping a bit her rights of indiscretion.

  Still, I confess, it gave me some small pleasure, for the moment, to feel loved. Of course, this little period of da! was quickly followed by yet another dose of fort!

  I finished The Mandarins. Although Simone dedicated it to Algren, his character, “Lewis Brogan,” occupies a surprisingly small number of pages in the book. He doesn’t even appear until page 324. The sixth chapter is narrated in the first person by “Anne,” the middle-aged French psychologist who falls for him when she goes on a trip to Chicago. At first, she seems a little calculating.

  A couple of chapters later she reunites with her lover and they go on a trip to Mexico. He seems to resent the fact that she won’t give up definitively her life in Paris with her left-wing intellectual husband. Still, there’s a lot of chemistry between them. They keep breathlessly saying things like, “I’ll love you till the day I die.” At one point he says he’s trying not to love her so much and she tells him to stop trying. It’s melodramatic, and a little embarrassing.

  Then in Chapter 10, she goes back to visit him again and he’s chilly and distant. She’s supposed to spend the whole summer with him, but he immediately announces something along the lines of, “I love you but I’m not in love with you.” Interestingly, it’s right around here that she says she’s reading The New Yorker and suddenly thinks, “I don’t give a damn about Faulkner – the real tragedy is that Lewis and I should be fucking and we’re not.” I paraphrase, but the business about Faulkner is really t
here.

  Despite his new chilliness, “Lewis” thinks they should just go ahead and make the best of a bad situation, but “Anne” seems to flail between utter calm (“ ‘ Well, that’s it,’ I thought coldly.”) and frightening despair (“I wanted to howl until I died.”) When they part, they both seem to know it’s over, but they agree that each will always have a place in the other’s heart.

  As you can imagine, the passionate parts feel badly overwritten. The interesting moments are the ones where both of them are being so chilly. The book ends with “Anne” contemplating suicide, but not because of losing “Lewis,” and it isn’t even because of war and the bleak fact that everybody dies anyway. It’s because those things don’t particularly move her anymore. But she doesn’t kill herself. She thinks there’s some vague possibility she’ll be happy again some day. Very existentialist.

  Here’s a bit of a message from very early in our correspondence:

  Tuesday, January 25, 2005, 8:16 p.m.

  Subject: Mrs. S

  You mention Simone de Beauvoir in your third book, but I’d already made the stylistic connection from the first one I read. I also discovered her when I was 17. (I read Une mort très douce on a trip to Paris with my mother. We thought at the time that she was dying, but she got better.)

  Do you remember that Monty Python episode in which Mrs. Premise and Mrs. Conclusion go to visit Jean-Paul Sartre in Paris? “Mrs. S.” says, “He’s in one of his bleeding moods: ‘the bourgeoisie this is the bourgeoisie that…’”

  She did remember.

  Once the paramour wrote me an e-mail that ended very affectionately, saying that it seemed I would be my lover’s “friend forever or something like that.” I answered, “Of course I am your friend forever.” I hope I will be. Naturally, I am starting to wonder about the possible repercussions of writing this manuscript. I haven’t received any word in over a week. The last message I sent was friendly, but I did mention something about Simone de Beauvoir’s letters being “silly and brilliant and girlish and superior and pathetic and sadistic and loving and cold.” This may have come across as somewhat accusatory. I think at this point it’s hardly necessary to point out that I was also talking about myself.

  Tzipi has the admirable habit of maintaining friendly relations with many of her former lovers. I’ve also tended to do this throughout my life. In fact, just this week I received an e-mail from someone I saw in my twenties. Ten years later, after Carlo and I split up, I called this person, and we had a brief and torrid repeat encounter. It was very helpful. It got me over the hump. Now, after another ten years, he was just checking in. It wasn’t clear whether he would be interested in going to bed again. I do this kind of thing sometimes with my exes.

  The other day I was flipping through the new New Yorker and I saw a picture of Mikhail Baryshnikov in an advertisement for a Movado watch. I looked at his face and thought, “He also breathed hotly and hungrily into Tzipi’s mouth.” They had a well-known and long-running, sporadic love affair years ago. In fact, there’s a character very clearly based on him in her fourth novel, With Conviction and with a Rigorous Sadness. Now they’re just friends. They kiss on the lips when they see each other, but in that friendly way you can do with someone after so many years.

  Once I wrote Tzipi about a comment that a friend had made at a dinner party at my house. Sandro had entertained the guests by playing piano and making some uncanny jokes, and then he had passed out on the couch. My friend looked at me with his eyebrows raised and asked, “How did you create this miraculous person?” I said, “Well, I had an egg and I got some sperm.” I was very proud, of course. I told you, Tzipi is also very close to her older son, Asher. She had told me that when she was trying to get pregnant with her ex-husband, they’d been living right near the beach and she had this sense that the pounding of the waves was part of the whole amniotic process of Asher’s conception. After I wrote her about my friend Leonard’s comment about Sandro, I mentioned one other lovely thing that Sandro had done, which particularly charmed Tzipi. She sent a quick message reiterating my friend’s praise, and I responded:

  Saturday, October 27, 2007, 10:16 p.m.

  Subject: conception

  > How did you conceive this miraculous person?

  Right?

  But it’s very interesting that you changed the question a little bit. Leonard said, “How did you create this miraculous person?” “To create” is different from “to conceive,” which would seem to imply that it’s all about DNA, except “conception” also brings us back to Asher who was conceived in an atmosphere of sea-sex, which takes you far from both the behaviorist and the biological models.

  But conception is a great word because it makes a child seem like a parent’s IDEA, and that makes me think of the birth of Athena, who just popped out of Zeus’s head.

  I believe a little bit in biology and a little bit in behaviorism and I also believe I imagined Sandro and he popped out of my head fully formed, but I believe just as much in other highly unlikely explanations like reincarnation, or better yet, the aboriginal belief in child spirits and the woman’s capacity to conceive alone depending on the strength of her orgasm and vaginal fluids.

  I read about some people somewhere, I don’t remember where, who thought that semen could last many years in a woman’s body, so paternity could be attributed to a lover from her distant past. I find this interesting because sometimes I see in Sandro qualities of different people from my past, and it seems almost like all that semen mixed together. I like this idea.

  But Sandro’s theory is that he was very lucky to be “fathered” by my “lesbian friends” and by a “crazy Mexican” (Raul).

  Are you still in Greece? I wanted to get back to Freud and “A Child is Being Beaten” and the masturbation of little girls.

  We went to the Metropolitan Opera last night to see Verdi’s Macbeth! Very bloody!

  As you can see, things Greek have occupied a considerable amount of space in my correspondence with Tzipi. Which was part of why it was so important to me that we were going to be spending time together on Mykonos. In fact, the visit itself seemed to me so symbolic, even the most banal practical details – my connecting flight on Olympic Airlines, paying my cab fare to the driver, Epifanio – seemed to take on mythic significance. This was also attached to the fact that so many of the cultural references we had were fundamentally about sex and sexuality: Sappho, of course, and Dionysus in ’69. We’d essentially been living in the mythic realm, or working our way toward it, and this is why, on that balmy night on Mykonos, it seemed oddly right that when I opened my eyes on Tzipi’s guest bed to see who was entering the patio door, I saw Medusa.

  She was carrying a boom box. Between this and the wriggling snakes all over her head, she was having a somewhat difficult time getting through the door. She banged the doorframe with her sound system, which was what really got my attention, but somehow she managed to get in, set up her equipment on the floor, and hit play. It was Fani Drakopoulou singing “Thelo na ta pio.” Melina’s snakes were dripping all over her forehead as she shimmied and swiveled to the music. Snakes in her eyes and the dim lighting may have contributed to her inability to discern that she was dancing for her arch nemesis, me, and not the impossibly desirable Tzipi. Her eyes were shut, in fact, and yet from her grimacing mouth and tremulous dance performance, it was clear that she was crying, and had been for some time. Aside from the snakes, Melina was wearing a flesh-tone Lycra unitard. Her large, firm breasts pushed up against it, struggling to escape. She had no panties on and her pubic hair was entirely visible. She swiveled her hips and turned in a circle, one snake slipping off her shoulder and dropping to the floor. Tzipi was right about her ass.

  As you can imagine, things started to go haywire pretty quickly. The snakes weren’t cooperating, and the CD started to skip. Melina, who was really in no condition to deal with these frustrations, ended up dropping to the floor herself and kicking the boom box with her left foot. Then she
began sobbing and kicking away her snakes.

  That’s when her dad came thumping in, screaming in Greek. I couldn’t tell if he was angrier with Melina or with me, and I didn’t understand a word he said. All I know is, when Melina figured out I wasn’t Tzipi, she started in on me too, and then she and her father started hitting each other, and the only thing she could yell at me in English was, “Bitch! Go back to America!” And finally her dad dragged her out and she carried the boom box and he managed to round up the snakes (in point of fact there were only five although their initial effect gave the impression of there being many more) and they were out of there. Fortunately I’d kept Epifanio’s card and I called him and got him to take me back to the airport and after a hellish wait at the Olympic Airlines counter I managed to change my tickets and get the hell out of Mykonos. I had a splitting headache.