A week before in Wellington Eric’d had the most confusing visit from Constance Green, who he hadn’t seen now in eight years. She’d tracked him down on one of her whirlwind trips from the East Village in New York by phoning Cyril Johnson, now Archbishop of the Auckland Diocese. Shallow, flighty Constance, still a welter of opinions and hip clothes, asked Eric if she could shoot a video of him. “About what?” he asked cautiously. “Oh, you know, you,” she’d said. He turned her down, mobilizing his large voice behind his chiseled features: “Why should I let you make fun of me?” This stopped her cold. Perhaps the distances between them were not so interesting.
30. On Saturday, April 8 we spent a perfect afternoon together. You arrived at the motel around noon and I was kind of shaky. Instead of going to the gym that morning I’d stayed home writing about Jennifer Harbury. She was in the news that month after almost singlehandedly bringing down the military government of Guatemala. Jennifer, an American leftist lawyer, had spent the last three years demanding that the Guatemalan army exhume the body of her husband, a disappeared Indian rebel leader. Jennifer’s story was so inspiring… and I was glad to’ve discovered it, even though my only motivation to write about her story was to take the heat off you. I’d cut back and forth between Jennifer and Efraim, me and “Derek Rafferty.” You’d been so horrified to see your name in the last two stories and I thought if I could write about how love can change the world then I wouldn’t have to write about you personally.
Fuck her once, she’ll write a book about it, you or anybody else might say.
I was becoming you. When I pushed you from my thoughts you came back into my dreams. But now I had to prove my love for you was real by holding back and considering what you wanted. I had to act responsively, responsibly…I was spewing words and syntaxes I remembered reading in your book, The Ministry of Fear.
32. We talked awhile and drank some fruit juice. You liked the way I’d rearranged things in the motel room. (It was crammed with talismans and artworks that my LA friends had given me, thinking rightly that I needed some protection.) We looked at Sabina Ott’s scratched-up yellow drawing, Daniel Marlos’ photo of people with banana-dildos in the desert. You were intrigued by this, by images of sex that weren’t heterosexual, a bit disturbed that dicks could be the butt of jokes. The photos of Keith Richards and Jennifer Harbury—motifs for this bogus story about my fictional cowboy love for “Derek Rafferty”—scotch-taped to the wall didn’t go unnoticed. We talked some more and you explained how you’d ignored me at the opening last night because everything was getting too referential. I understood. Then both of us were hungry. We ate lunch at a soul-food restaurant up on Washington and I told you all about the failure of my movie. Then you confessed how, over the past two years, you’d stopped reading. This broke my heart. Outside the storefront restaurant the East Pasadena Saturday afternoon was clanging. You paid the bill, then we drove my rental car up to the wilderness preserve above Lake Avenue.
“Let’s go to But-ter-fly Creek!”
Walking up the dirt track along the still-green mountain, everything between us flattened out. You seemed so open. You told me all about yourself at 12 years old, a young boy sitting at the edge of a playing field somewhere in the English Midlands, reading stories of great emperors and wars in Latin. You’d read your way into the world just like my husband. You told me other things about your life and what you’d left behind. You were so unhappy. Emotional seduction. The sun was very warm. When you took your shirt off you seemed to be inviting me to touch you but I refrained. To yearn responsibly. You had the softest palest skin, an alien’s. “The Pacific starts here,” I said. The landscape on the hill reminded me of New Zealand.
There weren’t any butterflies on the hill in Pasadena. But come out to a clearing, and there’s a waterfall, and then I told you how I admired you, and you said or you implied that what I’d done had helped you burn through some things in your life. And everything seemed as pliant as a macrocarpa branch, fragile as an egg.
33. In the blinding sunlight of the Vagabond Motel parking lot you asked me if I’d call again before I left LA. Perhaps we could have dinner. We embraced, and I was first to break away.
34. Sunday, April 9: Writing in my notebook after visiting Ray Johannson in Elysian Park: Bliss.
35. And so I called you up on Monday night. I was booked to leave at 10 p.m. on Tuesday. “The schizophrenic reacts violently when any attempt is made to influence him. This is so because a lack of ego boundaries make it impossible for him to set limits of identification.” (Róheim) The schizophrenic is a sexy Cyborg. When I reached you you were cold, ironic, wondering why I’d called. I hung up sweating. But I couldn’t leave like this, I had to try and make it better.
I called you back, apologized, “I—I just felt like I had to ask you why you sounded so distant and defensive.”
“Oh,” you said. “I don’t know. Was I defensive? I was just looking for something in my room.”
I threw up twice before getting on the plane.
36. Dear Dick,
No woman is an island-ess. We fall in love in hope of anchoring ourselves to someone else, to keep from falling,
DICK WRITES BACK
Chris finished writing Add It Up before the end of August. The next morning she accidentally cut her right hand on a broken glass. The cut left a bumpy scar. She knew that Add It Up would be the last letter.
Chris posted it to Dick after getting back from the hospital. She wanted a response, and fast, because things were finally happening with her film and she’d be travelling, starting in September. Perhaps the only reason Dick had never written back was she’d failed to express her feelings for him forcefully? Surely Add It Up would convince him. She waited for his letter, but by Labor Day, Dick still hadn’t phoned or written.