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.
Dear Dick,
I may be leaving the scene of the crime, but I can’t let it fade out into nothingness.
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.
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.
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 Chris 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.
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?
December 15, 1994
Sylvère gets off the plane in Paris, France. Seven thousand miles and 15 hours later he’s lost the drift of what it was in California that made writing love letters to his colleague seem like a good idea. He’s experiencing Virillian free-fall. His plastic hip is killing him. He carries Percoset and Darvon, searching everyday for the magic mix that’ll cut the pain without completely numbing him. Sylvère limps from his mother’s tenement apartment near the Bourse across the right bank to Bastille. Of course he hasn’t slept. At noon, it’s dark and freezing. He feels like an ancient animal. His first meeting is with Isabelle, an old acquaintance, sometime-lover from New York who’s acquired an important work of dubious provenance by Antonin Artaud. Nominally, Isabelle’s an independent film producer, though in reality she’s an ex-cokehead on a trustfund now in four-day-a-week analysis. Sylvère had always thought of Isabelle as one of the wildest and most reckless girls. Therefore, he can’t wait to sound her on the Dick adventure. Isabelle listens carefully. “But Sylvère!” she says. “You’re crazy. You put yourself in danger.”
Back in Crestline, Chris sits hunched over her Toshiba. The truck is packed. She has a vague belief she’ll write to Dick throughout the trip. She has a vague belief that writing is the only possible escape to freedom. She doesn’t want to lose the drift. She types this story:
I wake up wired, tired, but still running on nervous energy. The sunlight hurts my eyes, my mouth’s still fuzzy from last night’s booze and cigarettes. The day’s not slowing down for me and I’m not ready.
Did we fuck? Yes …but the fuck seems insignificant beside the lengths we went to to get there. The daze I’m in right now seems realer. What’s there to say? It was sensationless, pro-forma.
When I got to Dick’s around 8 he was expecting me. ‘Date’ arrangements had been made: dimmed lights, reggae music on the stereo, vodka, condoms waiting by the bed though of course I didn’t see them until later. Dick’s place suddenly seemed like a cut-rate banquet hall or funeral parlor—generic props waiting to be cleared away for the arrival of the next corpse, bride, girl. Was I entering the same setting of seduction as poor Kyla?
I started out embarrassed and conciliatory, quite willing to admit I was a fly caught in the web of your enormous sex appeal, charisma. But then you deviated from the seducer’s role by freely voicing the contempt that lies beneath it. You asked me questions, held up my desire to the light as if it were a strange and mutant thing. As if it were a symptom of my uniquely troubled character. And how was I to answer? I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to fuck. Your questions made me feel ashamed. When I turned them back on you, you answered bored and noncommittally.