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.
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 endeavors: 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.