I Love Dick (7 page)

There are no messages from Dick that evening on the answering machine. The house is empty, clean. After dinner Sylvère and Chris sit together on the floor and turn the laptop on.

EXHIBIT H:   SYLVÈRE AND CHRIS
'
LAST CRESTLINE LETTERS

Tuesday, December 13, 1994

Crestline, California

Dear Dick,

I'm leaving for France in less than 24 hours. The clock is ticking though you seem unaware of it. This is a perfect tragic space.

It's such a bitch. This morning I felt some remorse, some empathy with you. It's been such a persecution game. But then again when you think of all the dozens of pages written, millions of words that've crossed our minds about you and all we ever did was phone you twice and send one miserable fax? I mean the discrepancy is mind-blowing.

Last night we thought we had it nailed, and in a sense we do. There's no way of communicating with you in writing because texts, as we all know, feed upon themselves, become a game. The only way left is face to face. When Chris woke up this morning I made my decision. She should go back to Antelope Valley alone and meet you, Dick.

But by the end of the afternoon I started having doubts. This morning I left a message with the President of your school thanking him for a pleasant evening. Imagine the scene: the President mentioning to you that I might join the faculty next year, Chris arriving on your doorstep just when you thought the devilish couple had flown away. What would you do? Say “Hi” or reach for your airgun? Maybe it's not such a good idea. Let's try another:

Chris arrives in Antelope Valley around sundown and settles in your favorite bar. She leans against the door sipping a long-necked beer and waiting for your car to drive by. Should she call your house? But she knows you're screening calls.

Here's another: you drive past the bar and notice that her truck is parked outside. You pull up by the bar, take your hat off and go inside. She looks up modestly across the long empty table of this cantina and sees your frame hovering in the door. The rest is history.

Scene Number Three: Chris books a room at a motel in a nearby town. She considers phoning you, decides against it, then on impulse drives to Antelope Valley and installs herself at your favorite bar. After a while she strikes up a conversation with the barman. Does he happen to know anything about this gringo living by himself on the edge of town? A nice guy, but somewhat strange? Chris fires questions at the soft Chicano cowboys who make a living keeping the undocumented Guatemalan orange pickers in line. Do they know your girlfriend? Do you have a girlfriend? Do you come here often? Do you go home alone? Do you talk? What do you say? “Whatsamatter?” the leathery-white American barkeep asks. “Are you a cop? Has he done something wrong?” “Yes,” Chris says. “He won't return my calls.”

You see? It's no use hiding.

So long for now,
Chris & Sylvère

Tuesday, December 13, 1994

Crestline, California

Dear Dick,

None of these ideas are right. The closest I can come to touching you (and I still want to) is to take a photo of the bar in your town. It'd be a wideshot, kind of Hopper-esque, daylight tungsten clashing with the dusky sky, a desert sunset wrapped around the stucco building, a single lightbulb hung inside…

Have you ever read
The Blue of Noon
by Georges Bataille? He keeps talking about chasing, missing, the Bluebird of Happiness… Oh Dick, I'm so saaaad.

Chris

Dear Dick,

I may be leaving the scene of the crime, but I can't let it fade out into nothingness.

Sylvère

Tuesday, December 13, 1994

Crestline, California

Dear Dick,

I'm not sure I still want to fuck you. At least, not in the same way. Sylvère keeps talking about us disturbing your “fragility” but I'm not sure I agree. There's nothing so remarkable in one more woman adoring you. It's a “problem” you're confronting all the time. I'm just a particularly annoying one, one who refuses to behave. That makes the picture less appealing, and I just can't desire you anymore in that straight-up, Saturday night
Some Girls
kind of way. And yet I feel this tenderness towards you, after all we've been through. All I want's a photo of your favorite bar. Today I phoned your colleague Marvin Dietrichson, to find out what you did today. What you said in seminar. What you were wearing. I'm finding new ways to be close to you. It's okay, Dick, we can do the relationship your way.

Chris

Tuesday, December 13, 1994

Crestline, California

Dear Dick,

Call me persistent if you want but if you're an artist you can't rely on other people to do the work for you. Tomorrow night Chris is coming out to Antelope Valley.

Sylvère

And now it's nearly 10 o'clock at night and Chris is heartbroken and Dick still hasn't called. She knows she really won't drive out to Dick's house, she'll just drive away, and she hates Sylvère for pushing her to play the fool. But thanks to Dick, Sylvère and Chris have spent the four most intense days of their lives together. Sylvère wonders if the only way that he can feel close to her is when someone else is threatening to tear them apart.

The telephone rings. Chris jumps a mile. But it wasn't Dick, only the Dart Canyon Storage Man worrying because they'd left the locks to their storage bin open.

Should Chris call Dick? Should she rehearse it? After all, the last time she'd been taken by surprise. A single idea drifts across her mind, based on something she'd heard from Marvin Dietrichson the day before. Dick was struggling to finish writing some grant proposals for his Department before the Christmas break. That was a possible “in.” Did Dick know Chris had once been a professional grantwriter? That she could whip out a proposal faster than Dick could whip it out? Should she offer to help, in compensation for all this trouble? But where would they meet? In his office? In his house? In the Antelope Valley bar?

Dear Sylvère,

There has to be something to look forward to, otherwise I just can't go on living.

Love,
Chris

Dear Chris,

From now on we'll have Dick's memory to cherish in everything we do. All through your trip across America we'll exchange faxes about him. He'll be our bridge between the Café Flores and the Texas oilfields…

Wednesday, December 14, 1994

Sylvère looked sad and tired when Chris left him with his overcoat and bags at the Palm Springs Airport. He'd fly to LAX, then JFK, then Paris while Chris finished packing up the house in Crestline. Chris stopped and bought
The Best of the Ramones
CD. When she got back to the house around lunchtime there were no messages from Dick but Sylvère had left one changing planes. “Hi Sweetie, I'm just calling to say goodbye again. We had a wonderful time together, it just keeps getting better and better.”

His message touched her. But later that day, talking to her neighbor's kids, she was shocked to learn that Lori and her family were certain Sylvère was her father. Was it that obvious, even to the most casual observer, they were no longer having sex? Or did it mean that Lori, a confident assertive Black woman from LA, couldn't fathom someone her and Chris' age hooking up with an old wreck? Lori's younger boyfriend was handsome, silent, mean; he was a kind of ghetto-Dick.

“Dear Dick,” Chris typed into her Toshiba laptop, “This morning the sun was coming up over the mountains as I drove Sylvère to the airport. It was another glorious California day and I thought about how different it is here from New York. A land of golden opportunity, freedom and the leisure to do—what? Become a serial killer, a Buddhist, swing, write letters to you?

December 15, 1994

Sylvère gets off the plane in Paris, France. Seven thousand miles and 15 hours later he's lost the drift of what it was in California that made writing love letters to his colleague seem like a good idea. He's experiencing Virillian free-fall. His plastic hip is killing him. He carries Percoset and Darvon, searching everyday for the magic mix that'll cut the pain without completely numbing him. Sylvère limps from his mother's tenement apartment near the Bourse across the right bank to Bastille. Of course he hasn't slept. At noon, it's dark and freezing. He feels like an ancient animal. His first meeting is with Isabelle, an old acquaintance, sometime-lover from New York who's acquired an important work of dubious provenance by Antonin Artaud. Nominally, Isabelle's an independent film producer, though in reality she's an ex-cokehead on a trustfund now in four-day-a-week analysis. Sylvère had always thought of Isabelle as one of the wildest and most reckless girls. Therefore, he can't wait to sound her on the Dick adventure. Isabelle listens carefully. “But Sylvère!” she says. “You're crazy. You put yourself in danger.”

Back in Crestline, Chris sits hunched over her Toshiba. The truck is packed. She has a vague belief she'll write to Dick throughout the trip. She has a vague belief that writing is the only possible escape to freedom. She doesn't want to lose the drift. She types this story:

EXHIBIT I:   “LAST NIGHT AT DICK'S”

I wake up wired, tired, but still running on nervous energy. The sunlight hurts my eyes, my mouth's still fuzzy from last night's booze and cigarettes. The day's not slowing down for me and I'm not ready.

Did we fuck? Yes …but the fuck seems insignificant beside the lengths we went to to get there. The daze I'm in right now seems realer. What's there to say? It was sensationless, pro-forma.

When I got to Dick's around 8 he was expecting me. ‘Date' arrangements had been made: dimmed lights, reggae music on the stereo, vodka, condoms waiting by the bed though of course I didn't see them until later. Dick's place suddenly seemed like a cut-rate banquet hall or funeral parlor
—
generic props waiting to be cleared away for the arrival of the next corpse, bride, girl. Was I entering the same setting of seduction as poor Kyla?

I started out embarrassed and conciliatory, quite willing to admit I was a fly caught in the web of your enormous sex appeal, charisma. But then you deviated from the seducer's role by freely voicing the contempt that lies beneath it. You asked me questions, held up my desire to the light as if it were a strange and mutant thing. As if it were a symptom of my uniquely troubled character. And how was I to answer? I wouldn't be here if I didn't want to fuck. Your questions made me feel ashamed. When I turned them back on you, you answered bored and noncommittally.

Because you patronize me and refuse to see the possible reversibility of our situations it is impossible for me to state my love for you as totally as I feel it. You make me backtrack, hesitate. Then later, confused and psychically dismantled, I fall into your arms. A last resort. We kiss. The obligatory first contact before fucking.

Months later, parts of Chris' story would turn out to be remarkably prophetic.