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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”