“I never asked for this!” you said. And on the phone I was ashamed. My will had ridden over all your wishes, your fragility. By loving you this way I’d violated all your boundaries, hurt you.
Then you asked me how I was. Your way of asking ordinary social questions makes me think of Ruffo: it’s way past simple listening. It’s like you really want to know. Your attentive unshockability makes it possible to say anything. “I’m really fine,” I said. But I wanted you to know how much good you’ve done me. “It’s like—I’ve finally moved outside my head—I don’t think I’ll go back,” I said. Three days before I’d written in my notebook: “Since knowing D. my eyes have moved into my ribcage. My body’s turned to liquid glass and all the pieces fit…” And quoting Alice Notley quoting Donne: “No woman is an island-ess.”
And then again, remorse. I wanted you to understand I’d never use this writing to ‘expose’ you. “Look,” I said. “I’ll change the names, the dates, the place. It’ll be a past-tense narrative about cowboy love. I’ll call you ‘Derek Rafferty’ instead of Dick.”
You sounded less than thrilled. Was there any chance of redeeming things, this situation?
(A month before I’d sent you the first draft of a story called The Exegesis. On page 1 there was a line: “You were so wet,’ Dick ——’d said, glancing at his watch…” …You freaked. “But that’s my NAME!” you howled into the phone. And then you’d told me how, when you were writing your first book, you worked so hard to protect the people who you wrote about by concealing their identities. “And those were people who I loved,” you’d said. “You don’t even know me.”)
My feelings for you were so strong I had to find a way to make love selfless. So even though I’d travelled all this way just hoping I might see you, if seeing me was bad for you, I wouldn’t. It was April, the season of blood oranges, emotion running like the stream behind my house upstate, turbulent and thawing. I thought about how fragile people get when they withdraw from anything, how they become bloody yolks protected only by the thinnest shell.
“So—” you said.—“Did you want to see me?”
And this time (if morality’s repressing what you want over what you think is right) I responded morally: “I think the question’s more, do you feel like seeing me? ’Cause if this is a bad time for you, I think we should forget it.”
But then you said: “Ah, I just have to check my schedule for the next few days.”
You said: “Why don’t you call me back around this time tomorrow?”
It was 10:52. My hand was wet from holding the telephone so tightly.
20. My hand was wet from holding the telephone so tightly. I was sitting on the edge of the double bed in the motel room. The bedside lamp glared back into the room against the windows.
By the time I got out to Silverlake, 11:45 p.m., Ray’s party was already breaking up. Ray introduced me to Michelle Di Blasi, a writer-filmmaker who’d been all over New York in the early ’80s. Where are they now? (a favorite conversational routine among survivors, sightings of the once-famous waiting tables, picking garbage…) But Michelle looked great, and on the plane that afternoon I’d been reading one of her new stories. It was the kind of story everybody likes, about a tough girl who becomes a truer version of herself by uncovering her vulnerability. It was the kind of story people like because its universe is played out in the story of one person. It was the kind of story (dare I say it?) that women’re supposed to write because all its truths are grounded in a single lie: denying chaos. Michelle was nice: smart and open, radiant and charming.
The crowd was thinning out. Ray Johannson sat down and drank a beer with me and started to critique my writing. He said the “flaw” in all these stories is that I’m addressing them to you. I should learn to be more “independent.” Everyone was disappointed that Amanda Plummer hadn’t showed but I met another famous person’s sister.
21. Last January when Sylvère and I had dinner at your house and I handed you a xerox of my first 120 letters you said, “I’m gobstruck.” The other guests had all gone home and we sat around your table drinking vodka. The glass shattered when you poured Sylvère a shot. The three of us agreed to meet for breakfast the next day in Antelope Valley at Five Corners Diner.
Sylvère and I found you already sitting there at 9 a.m. and it was a gloomy fucking morning. The worn-out raincoat you were wearing reminded me of the record that you’d played the night before, The Greatest Hits of Leonard Cohen. It’s geometrically impossible to arrange a group of three in anything but a straight line or a triangle. Sylvère sat next to you, I sat across. The conversation circled nervously. Sylvère was elusive, you were cryptic. I could hardly eat my oatmeal. Finally you focussed sharp and looked at me and asked “Are you still anorexic?” An allusion to my second letter. “Not really,” I demurred, hoping you’d say more. But then you didn’t, so I blurted out: “Did you read them? Did you really read my letters?”
“Oh, I glanced through them,” you said. “Alone this morning in my bedroom. With all this rain, I found it very film noir…”
I wondered what you meant (I didn’t ask) but now I’m right there too: shuttling urban & alone the night of April 5 between the airport and the rental car, the car and the motel…fixed points on a floating grid. The motel phone, the ashtray. The stupid Heidi-in-Bavaria waitress costumes at the restaurant party, a Tyrolean horrorshow, the dregs of food, the conversations. Taking foolish stabs at girlfriendhood to Michelle Di Blasi by burbling on about the problems of my film. CUT-CUT-CUT. Robbe-Grillet meets Marguerite Duras and suddenly you’re nowhere. Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective stumbles up out of a basement bar sometime in the ’70s and rounds a corner into wartime London. Paint it Black, Noir. Time’s an unsealed envelope and crime’s a metaphor for anguish, private symphonies of intensity exploding in the dark.
22. Of course it’s no surprise when Félix Guattari talks about love in the same breath as schizophrenia. Here’s a passage that I found three weeks ago when I started writing this and now it’s August and I can’t find the citation, and anyhow it’s my translation, i.e., a cross between what he wrote and what I wanted him to say: “It’s like this: someone falls in love and in a universe that once was closed, suddenly everything seems possible. Love and sex are mediums for semiotizing mutation.”
I disagree, at least I think I do, about the “semiotizing” part (Dear Dick, Dear Marshall, Dear Sylvère, What is semiotics?). Love and sex both cause mutation, just like I think desire isn’t lack, it’s surplus energy—a claustrophobia inside your skin—
Félix goes on: “Previously unimagined systems unfurl themselves in a once empty world. New possibilities of freedom are revealed. Of course none of this is ever guaranteed.”
And now IT’S GETTING VERY LATE. It’s August and since July 6 when I started writing this I’ve been in an altered state, have lost 10 lbs, etc.
This morning when I took a walk I thought about a talk I’ll give next fall (I’ve been invited to your school) about poetics. I want to play video I edited two years ago for Jim Brodey’s funeral. Jim was a quote-minor New York poet who died of AIDS after living in the street. In the tape he talks about Lew Welch, a quote-minor San Francisco poet who would’ve drunk himself to death if he hadn’t suicided first in the ’70s. I want to hand out copies of Alice Notley’s brilliant essay Dr William’s Heiresses where she talks about how female poets like herself who externalize and twist internal daily life have hardly any female ancestors. The critic Kathleen Fraser thought that for not inventing some, Alice was a bad feminist. Alice Notley proved the possibility of writing poems no matter what; Kathleen Fraser is an academic. “No woman is an island-ess,” oh… The message is, IT’S GETTING VERY LATE. Be glad you’re in a California art school but don’t forget you live by compromise and contradiction ’cause those who don’t just die like dogs.