You sympathized and said, “Well, I guess now the game is over.”
How could I make you understand the letters were the realest thing I’d ever done? By calling it a game you were negating all my feelings. Even if this love for you could never be returned I wanted recognition. And so I started ranting on about Guatemala. The femme seduction trip seemed so corrupt and I was clueless how to do it. The only way I knew of reaching you apart from fucking was through ideas and words.
So I started trying to legitimize the “game” by telling you my thoughts about Case Studies. I was using Henry Frundt’s book about the Guatemalan Coca-Cola strike as a model.
“’Cause don’t you see?” I said. “It’s more a project than a game. I meant every word I wrote you in those letters. But at the same time I started seeing it as a chance to finally learn something about romance, infatuation. Because you reminded me of so many people I’d loved back in New Zealand. Don’t you think it’s possible to do something and simultaneously study it? If the project had a name it’d be I Love Dick: A Case Study.”
“Oh,” you said, not too enthusiastically.
“Look,” I said. “I started having this idea when I read Frundt’s book after getting back from Guatemala. He’s a sociologist specializing in Third World agribusiness. Frundt’s a structural Marxist—instead of ranting on about imperialism and injustice he wants to find the reasons. And reasons aren’t global. So Frundt researched every aspect of the Guatemalan Coca-Cola strike during the 1970s and ’80s.
“He recorded everything. The only way to understand the large is through the small. It’s like American first-person fiction.”
You were listening, eyes moving up and down between me and your wine glass on the table. I saw what I was saying register across your face… cryptically, ambiguously, shifting between curiosity and incredulity. Your face was like the faces of the lawyers in the topless bars when I started telling Buddhist fairy tales with my legs spread wide across the table. Some Strange Scene. Were they amused? Were they assessing their capacity for cruelty? Your eyes were slightly crinkled, your fingers wrapped around glass. All this encouraged me to continue.
(Dear Dick, I always thought that both of us became political for the same reason. Reading constantly and wanting something else so fiercely that you want it for the world. God I’m such a Pollyanna. Perhaps enthusiasm’s the only thing I have to offer you.)
“The more particular the information, the more likely it will be a paradigm. The Coca-Cola strike’s a paradigm for the relationship between multinational franchises and host governments. And since Guatemala is so small and all the facets of its history can be studied, it’s a paradigm for many Third World countries. If we can understand what happened there, we can get a sense of everything. And don’t you think the most important question is, How does evil happen?
“At the height of the Coca-Cola strike in 1982, the army killed all the leaders of the strike and all their families. They killed the lawyers too, Guatemalan and American. The one they missed—her name was Marta Torres—they found her teenage daughter on a city street, disappeared and blinded her.”
Did it cross my mind that torture was not a sexy topic of conversation for this, our first, our only date? No, never. “’Cause don’t you see? By recording every single memo, phone call, letter, meeting that took place around the strike, Frundt describes how casually terror happens. If Mary Fleming hadn’t sold her Coca-Cola franchise to John Trotter, an ultra-rightist friend of Bush, the strike might not have happened. All acts of genocidal horror may be nauseatingly similar but they arise through singularity.”
I still hadn’t gotten round to explaining what Guatemalan genocide had to do with the 180 pages of love letters that I’d written with my husband and then given you, like a timebomb or a cesspool or a manuscript. But I would, I would. I felt like we were facing each other from the edges of a very dark and scary crater. Truth and difficulty. Truth and sex. I was talking, you were listening. You were witnessing me become this crazy and cerebral girl, the kind of girl that you and your entire generation vilified. But doesn’t witnessing contain complicity? “You think too much,” is what they always said when their curiosity ran out.
“I want to own everything that happens to me now,” I told you. “Because if the only material we have to work with in America is our own lives, shouldn’t we be making case studies?”
OH EGYPT I AM WASHING MY HAIR TO GAIN KNOWLEDGE OF YOU, and by this time we were eating dinner. It was packaged fresh linguini, packaged sauce and salad. I couldn’t eat a bite. “That’s fine,” you said. “Just don’t take me down along with you.”
“He took me by the shoulders and shook me out.” That’s how Jennifer Harbury described meeting Efraim Bamaca.
Jennifer was interviewing rebel fighters in the Tajumulco combat zone in 1990. She felt so pale and large. “Compared to everyone else I’m huge, I’m 5’3. A giant.” Bamaca was a Mayan peasant educated by the rebel army. At 35 he was notorious, a leader. Meeting him surprised her. “He looked almost like a fawn,” she said. “He was so quiet and discreet. He never gave orders but somehow everything got done.” And when she interviewed him for her oral history book, that most self-erasing lefty genre, he turned the questions back on her and listened.
They fell in love. When Jennifer left Tajumulco, Bamaca promised not to write. “There’s no such thing as a fantasy relationship.” But then he did, notes smuggled from the highlands to a safehouse, mailed from Mexico. A year later they met again and married. “It was a side of Jennifer I’d never seen,” another law school friend told the New York Times. “She seemed so happy.”
After dinner, then, you leaned back in your chair and fixed me with your gaze and asked: “What do you want?” A direct question tinged with irony. Your mouth was twisted, wry, like you already knew the answer. “What did you expect by coming here?”
Well I’d come this far, I was ready for all kinds of trials. So I said, out loud, the obvious: “I want to stay here tonight with you.” And you just kept staring at me, quizzically, wanting more. (Even though I hadn’t slept with anyone but my husband for 12 years, I couldn’t remember sexual negotiations ever being this humiliatingly explicit. But maybe this was good? A jumpcut from the cryptic to the literal?) So finally I said: “I want to sleep with you.” And then: “I want us to have sex together.”
You asked me: “Why?”
(The psychiatrist H.F. Searles lists six ways to drive another person crazy in The Etiology of Schizophrenia. Method Number Four: Control the conversation, then abruptly shift its modes.)
The night Sylvère and I slept over at your house I’d dreamt vividly about having different kinds of sex with you. While Sylvère and I slept on the sofabed I dreamt I’d slipped into your bedroom through the wall. What struck me most about the sex we had was, it was so intentional and deliberate. The dream occurred in two separate scenes. In Scene One we’re naked on your bed, viewed frontal-horizontally, foreshortened like Egyptian hieroglyphics. I’m squatting, neck and shoulders curved to reach your cock. Tendrils of my hair brush back and forth across your groin and thighs. It was the most subtle, psycho-scientific kind of blowjob. The perspective changes in Scene Two to vertical. I sit on top of you, you’re lying flat, head slightly arched, I’m sinking up and down your cock, each time I’m learning something new, we gasp at different times.