I Love Dick (13 page)

But she remembered all the times they'd worked together when her name had been omitted, how equivocal Sylvère'd been, how reluctant to offend anyone who paid them. She remembered the abortions, all the holidays she'd been told to leave the house so Sylvère could be alone with his daughter. In ten years, she'd erased herself. No matter how affectionate Sylvère'd been, he'd never been in love with her.

(The first night they ever stayed together in Sylvère's loft, Chris asked him if he ever thought about history. At that time Chris saw history like the New York Public Library, a place to meet dead friends. “All the time,” Sylvère replied, thinking about the Holocaust. It was then she fell in love with him.)

“Nothing is irrevocable,” Sylvère said. “No,” she screamed, “you're wrong!” By this time she was crying. “History isn't dialectical, it's essential! Some things will never go away!”

And the next day, Monday, January 30, she left him.

PART 2: EVERY LETTER IS A LOVE LETTER

EVERY LETTER IS A LOVE LETTER

Love has led me to a point

where I now live badly

'cause I'm dying of desire

I therefore can't feel sorry for myself

and
—

—Anonymous, 14th-century French Provençal

Thurman, New York

Wednesday, February 1, 1995

Dear Dick,

I'm writing to you from the country, the Town of Thurman in upstate New York. Yesterday I drove up here without stopping except for gas in Catskill at the Stewart's store. Tad's moved back to Pam's in Warrensburg. The house is empty and it's the first time I've been up here alone. It's funny how I don't feel lonely, though. Maybe it's the ghost of Mrs. Gideon. Or maybe 'cause I know the whole Thurman cast of characters from buying wood and fixing up the house and working at the school. The
Adirondack Times
reports on local happenings like Evie Cox's visit to the podiatrist in Glens Falls. Somehow this redneck town allows the possibility of a middle-aged New York City woman bouncing round a house alone more generously than Woodstock or East Hampton. It's a community of exiles anyway. No one asks me any questions 'cause there's no frame of reference to put the answers in.

For several days now I've been wanting to tell you about an installation I saw last week in New York. It was called
Minetta Lane
—
A Ghost Story
, by Eleanor Antin, an artist/filmmaker who I don't know very much about. The installation was pure magic. I sat in it for about an hour and felt I could have stayed all day. It was at Ronald Feldman Gallery on Mercer Street. You entered it through a sharply cornered narrow corridor—the white sheet rock of the gallery abruptly changed to crumbling plaster, rotting slats and boards, rolls of chicken-wire and other prewar tenement debris. You stumbled over this stuff the way you stumbled up the stairs, maybe, if you were lucky enough to've lived in NYC in the '50s when people still lived this way, on your way to a party or to visit friends. And as you rounded the last corner you came to a kind of foyer, a semi-circular wall with two large windows mounted on one side and a single window mounted, slightly higher, on the other.

There was a single wooden chair in front of the two windows and you sat down in it uneasily, not wanting to get your feet covered in plaster dust (I can't remember if the dust beside the chair was real or not). Three films played simultaneously in each of the three windows, rear-projected against the window panes. The corridor'd led you to this point so you could attend a kind of seance, becoming a voyeur.

Through the far-left window a middle-aged woman was painting on a large canvas. We saw her from behind, rumpled shirt and rumpled body, curly rumpled hair, painting, looking, thinking, drawing on a cigarette, reaching down onto the floor to take a few drinks from a bottle of Jim Beam here and there. It was an ordinary scene (though it's very ordinariness made it subversively utopian: how many pictures from the '50s do we have of nameless women painting late into the night and living lives?). And this ordinariness unleashed a flood of historical nostalgia, a warmth and closeness to a past I've never known—the same nostalgia that I felt from seeing a photo exhibition at St. Mark's Church a few years ago. There were maybe a hundred photos gathered by the Photographic/Oral History Project of the Lower East Side of artists living, drinking, working, in their habitat between the years 1948 and 1972. The photos were meticulously captioned with the artists' names and disciplines, but 98% of them were names I didn't know. The photos tapped into that same unwritten moment as Antin's show—it was the first time in American art history, thanks to allowances provided by the GI Bill, that lower-middle class Americans had a chance to live as artists, given time to kill. Antin recalls: “There was enough money around from the GI Bill to live and work in a low-rent district… Studios were cheap, so were paints and canvases, booze and cigarettes. All over the Village young people were writing, painting, getting psychoanalyzed and fucking the bourgeoisie.” Where are they now? The Photographic/Oral History Project show transformed the streets of the East Village into tribal ground. I felt a rush of empathetic curiosity about the lives of the unfamous, the unrecorded desires and ambitions of artists who had been here too. What's the ratio of working artists to the sum total of art stars? A hundred or a thousand? The first window did the job of shamanistic art, drawing together hundreds of disparate thoughts, associations (photos in the exhibition; lives; the fact that some of them were female too) into a single image. A rumpled woman paints and smokes a cigarette. And don't you think a “sacred space” is sacred only because of the collectivity it distills?

And then there was strange magic in this window too: a magic that would connect this window with the very different states depicted in the other two. After several minutes a little girl wearing a velvet dress and a large bow walks into the frame, the painter's “room.” Is this girl the woman's daughter? Is she the daughter of a friend? It's certain right away that the little girl lives in an entirely different metabolic and perceptual universe than her mother/caretaker/older friend. The canvas holds no particular appeal, though she's not pointedly disinterested in it either. She looks at it, then drifts away to look at something (us?) outside the window. Then this gets boring too, (She's got so much energy!) So she starts jumping up and down. Up 'til now the painter has been just peripherally aware of the little girl. But now she puts her brush down, lets herself glide into the game. The woman and the little girl jump up and down together. Then that moment passes too and the woman's drawn back into her work again.

(This installation grounds the structuralist fascination with the minutiae of varied states of concentration, passing moments, in the only thing that gives these moments any meaning: history and time passing through other people's lives…)

Through the second window on the right-side of the painter, a young couple cavort in a tenement kitchen bathtub. The girl's pale blonde, maybe 16, laughing, splashing water on her partner, a tall Black man in his 20s. They slip and slide, arm wrestling in and out of soggy embraces. It's not clear which one of them lives here (perhaps they both do, or maybe it's an apartment that they borrow?). At one point the little girl wanders out of the painter's window in this apartment chomping on a sandwich. She sits and eats, watching them from a ledge above the tub.

Her entry is a strange twist of voyeurism: we're watching her watching them. But of course there's no pornography in real-time. There isn't any story, either. Who these people are or where they're coming from is not what makes us want to watch them. It's a fact that's hinted at, that may or may not be revealed. We're outsiders, choosing just how much of this alternately awkward and cinematic slice of life we'll watch before shifting our gaze to another window. The couple are oblivious to us and continuous. They exist much more forcefully than we do.

After a while the little girl leaves and the young woman gets out of the bath, leaves the frame and returns wearing a big wool skirt and cotton camisole. She pulls on a white blouse (Catholic school uniform or standard boho-wear? Either way the intimacy of the scene is very casual and untransgressive) as her partner grabs a towel and climbs out of the bath.

In the third window, the one you have to turn your head or move the chair to see, an old European man gazes, quietly transfixed, into an empty ornamental bird cage in the foreground of his elaborately decorated prewar apartment. The walls behind him are deep green. Obviously he's lived in them for many years. There's a crystal chandelier above the bird cage and a warm light cuts across his face. The scene is timeless, concentrated, existing someplace outside ambivalence or emotion. We don't see any of what the man is seeing or pretends to, but we see shadows of it across his face. It's the most compelling, least definable of all three windows. Looking through it we're watching someone totally absorbed by something we can't see: a missing bird, a stranger's past, the mysteries of aging.

Later on (maybe segueing with an erotic highpoint in Window #2 and the little girl's arrival in the painter's room) a woman's face with golden Jean Harlow hair, lit '30s style by the chandelier, leans above the bird cage that the man so intently watches. The woman is an angel or a gift that the man doesn't seem to react to. Was she there all this time? Is his expression numbness, is it bliss? The man just keeps looking into the birdcage.

“The form of a city changes faster than the human heart,” Eleanor Antin quoting Baudelaire. The installation was a magic Cornell box, a tiny epic: all ages, modes of life, existing equally and together through the keyhole of this lost time. The installation was troubling and ecstatic.

Dick, its 10:30 at night, I broke off this morning after describing to you the first window and I'm too tired to continue now. This afternoon I went out for a walk feeling very light and clear—“Bright days,” I thought, thinking about an old movie idea I'd once had depicting the suicide of Lew Welch, the San Francisco poet, another beneficiary of the GI Bill, who walked off into the Sierra Mountains one winter in the mid-'70s never to be seen again… How perfectly this upstate winter landscape fits such a scene. I was even debating the kind of camera I would use, the kind of film, where I'd get it and the tripod, would there be another story, any actors?…when the logging road trailed off.

But I kept walking, thinking how I like winter best, along a deer trail, over ice, across a beaver fort 'til I was lost. The ground's all frozen but there's hardly any snow so it was impossible to follow tracks. I came up against an old chainlink fence, then left it walking what felt like south, over a stream then into a clearing, thinking High Street would be very close. But it wasn't—there were just more woods everywhere, scraggly trees grown up over land that's been logged and raped a dozen times in the past 150 years, deer tracks disappearing into bramble, and I realized I was walking erratically in jagged circles.

Up hill and down, I saw a partridge strut out from under a tree trunk. It took my breath away 'til I remembered I was lost. I went back and found the fence. It was mid-afternoon, a cloudy day though not too cold. Finding the fence'd taken nearly half an hour and now it was 3:30. I didn't know where the fence would go but maybe I should follow it? But maybe not. I tried one more time to walk back the way I came but nothing looked familiar. Woods-woods-woods and frozen ground. I saw no way out, no animal markings, which in any case I don't know how to read. So carefully I traced my way back again to the chainlink fence. I felt as though my eyes had moved outside my body. By now I'd left so many boot marks on the scattered snow I didn't know which tracks to follow home.

I looked out in the woods and felt alone and panicky. Anything could happen. In another 90 minutes it'd be pitch dark. If I didn't find the road by then what would happen? I thought of stories about people lost in winter woods and realized that I hadn't paid enough attention. At fifteen degrees on a stormless winter night, was death by hypothermia a done deal? Was it better to rest under some bramble or keep walking?

Just then I heard the distant sound of a chainsaw coming from what might've been the north side of the woods: should I follow it? The woods were thick, the sound was muted and sporadic. Should I try to find the stream and follow it, hoping it would lead back to the creekbed behind my house? But last year's logging'd left so many ruts it was impossible to tell which ice was streambed, which was frozen drainage. Then what about the fence? I didn't know how far or where it led, but neighbors said the fence marks off the property of the North Country Beagle Club which owns several hundred acres of this unwanted land.

Three springs ago my friend George Mosher and the State EnCon man stood out the back of my place trading stories about fools who'd gotten turned around walking through the woods back here and gotten lost. (None of these stories as I recalled took place in winter.) George, who's lived here his entire 80 years, says:
To find your way out of the woods look at the top tips of hemlock trees because they point North
. But I couldn't tell a hemlock from a balsam tree and I didn't know which direction the street is in, and anyway the woods were full of treetops pointing everywhere: north? east? south?

It occurred to me that there was only enough daylight left to act on one decision. If I chose wrong and was still here after dark, would Sylvère call the cops after finding me not home when he phoned from New York? Fat chance, because Sylvère says he is committed to supporting my independence, my new life. So if nobody would miss me until midnight or even tomorrow morning, what then? I had a wool scarf, my long black coat and vinyl gloves, though no matches or warm socks. Could I run in place from nightfall until 8 tomorrow morning to stay warm?