Chris was so embarrassed. She wondered if the call was really for Sylvère, but Dick didn’t ask for him, so she stayed on the scratchy line. Dick was phoning to explain his disappearance the night before. He’d gotten up early and drove out to Pear Blossom to pick up some eggs and bacon. “I’m a bit of an insomniac, you know.” When he’d gotten home to Antelope Valley he was genuinely surprised to find them gone.
At this moment, Chris could’ve told Dick her own farfetched interpretation: had she, this story would’ve taken another turn. But there was so much static on the line, and already she was afraid of him. She feverishly considered proposing another meeting, but she didn’t, and then Dick got off the phone. Chris stood in her makeshift office, sweating. Then she ran upstairs to find Sylvère.
December 5, 1994
Alone in Crestline, Sylvère and Chris spent most of last night (Sunday) and this morning (Monday) talking about Dick’s 3 minute call. Why does Sylvère entertain this? It could be that for the first time since last summer, Chris seems animated and alive, and since he loves her, Sylvère can’t bear to see her sad. It could be he’s reached an impasse with the book he’s writing on modernism and the holocaust, and dreads returning next month to his teaching job. It could be that he’s perverse.
December 6–8, 1994
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday of this week pass unrecorded, blurred. If memory serves, Tuesday that term was the day that Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer spent in Pasadena, teaching at Art Center College of Design. Shall we attempt a reconstruction? They get up at 8, drive down the hill from Crestline, grab coffee in San Bernardino, hop on the 215 to the 10 and drive for 90 minutes, hitting LA just after traffic. It’s likely they talked about Dick for most of the ride. However, since they planned to move out of Crestline in just 10 days, on December 14 (Sylvère to Paris for the holidays, Chris to New York), they must’ve also briefly talked logistics. A Restless Longing…driving through Fontana and Pomona, through a landscape that meant nothing, with an inconclusive future looming. While Sylvère lectured on poststructuralism, Chris drove out to Hollywood to pick up some publicity photos for her film and shopped for cheese at Trader Joe’s. Then they drove back out to Crestline, winding up the mountain through darkness and thick fog.
Wednesday and Thursday disappear. It’s obvious that Chris’ new film isn’t going to go very far. What will she do next? Her first experience in art had been as a participant in some druggy psychodramas of the ’70s. The idea that Dick may’ve proposed a kind of game between them is incredibly exciting. She explains it over and over to Sylvère. She begs Sylvère to phone him, fish around for some sign that Dick’s aware of her. And if there is, she’ll call.
Friday, December 9, 1994
Sylvère, a European intellectual who teaches Proust, is skilled in the analysis of love’s minutiae. But how long can anyone continue analyzing a single evening and a 3-minute call? Already, Sylvère’s left two unanswered messages on Dick’s answerphone. And Chris has turned into a jumpy bundle of emotions, sexually aroused for the first time in seven years. So on Friday morning, Sylvère finally suggests that Chris write Dick a letter. Since she’s embarrassed she asks him if he wants to write one too. Sylvère agrees.
Do married couples usually collaborate on billets doux? If Sylvère and Chris were not so militantly opposed to psychoanalysis, they might’ve seen this as a turning point.
Crestline, California
December 9, 1994
Dear Dick,
It must be the desert wind that went to our heads that night or maybe the desire to fictionalize life a little bit. I don’t know. We’ve met a few times and I’ve felt a lot of sympathy towards you and a desire to be closer. Though we come from different places, we’ve both tried breaking up with our pasts. You’re a cowboy; for ten years, I was a nomad in New York.
So let’s go back to the evening at your house: the glorious ride in your Thunderbird from Pasadena to the End of the World, I mean the Antelope Valley. It’s a meeting we postponed almost a year. And truer than I imagined. But how did I get into that?
I want to talk about that evening at your house. I had a feeling that somehow I knew you and we could just be what we are together. But now I’m sounding like the bimbo whose voice we heard, unwittingly, that night on your answerphone…
Crestline, California
December 9, 1994
Dear Dick,
Since Sylvère wrote the first letter, I’m thrown into this weird position. Reactive—like Charlotte Stant to Sylvère’s Maggie Verver, if we were living in the Henry James novel The Golden Bowl—the Dumb Cunt, a factory of emotions evoked by all the men. So the only thing that I can do is tell The Dumb Cunt’s Tale. But how?
Sylvère thinks it’s nothing more than a perverse longing for rejection, the love I feel for you. But I disagree, at bottom I’m a very romantic girl. What touched me were all the windows of vulnerability in your house…so Spartan and self-conscious. The propped up Some Girls album cover, the dusky walls—how out of date and déclassé. But I’m a sucker for despair, for faltering—that moment when the act breaks down, ambition fails. I love it and feel guilty for perceiving it and then the warmest indescribable affection floods in to drown the guilt. For years I adored Shake Murphy in New Zealand for these reasons, a hopeless case. But you’re not exactly hopeless: you have a reputation, self-awareness and a job, and so it occurred to me that there might be something to be learned by both of us from playing out this romance in a mutually self-conscious way. Abstract romanticism?
It’s weird, I never really wondered whether I’m ‘your type.’ (’Cause in the past, Empirical Romance, since I’m not pretty or maternal, I never am the type for Cowboy Guys.) But maybe action’s all that really matters now. What people do together overshadows Who They Are. If I can’t make you fall in love with me for who I am, maybe I can interest you with what I understand. So instead of wondering ‘Would he like me?’, I wonder ‘Is he game?’
When you called on Sunday night, I was writing a description of your face. I couldn’t talk, and hung up on the bottom end of the romantic equation with beating heart and sweaty palms. It’s incredible to feel this way. For 10 years my life’s been organized around avoiding this painful elemental state. I wish that I could dabble like you do around romantic myths. But I can’t, because I always lose and already in the course of this three-day totally fictitious romance, I’ve started getting sick. And I wonder if there’ll ever be a possibility of reconciling youth and age, or the anorexic open wound I used to be with the money-hustling hag that I’ve become. We suicide ourselves for our own survival. Is there any hope of dipping back into the past and circling round it like you can in art?
Sylvère, who’s typing this, says this letter lacks a point. What reaction am I looking for? He thinks this letter is too literary, too Baudrillardian. He says I’m squashing out all the trembly little things he found so touching. It’s not the Dumb Cunt Exegesis he expected. But Dick, I know that as you read this, you’ll know these things are true. You understand the game is real, or even better than, reality, and better than is what it’s all about. What sex is better than drugs, what art is better than sex? Better than means stepping out into complete intensity. Being in love with you, being ready to take this ride, made me feel 16, hunched up in a leather jacket in a corner with my friends. A timeless fucking image. It’s about not giving a fuck, or seeing all the consequences looming and doing something anyway. And I think you—I—keep looking for that and it’s thrilling when you find it in other people.