I Love Dick

PART 1: SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE

SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE

December 3, 1994

Chris Kraus, a 39-year-old experimental filmmaker and Sylvère Lotringer, a 56-year-old college professor from New York, have dinner with Dick ——, a friendly acquaintance of Sylvère’s, at a sushi bar in Pasadena. Dick is an English cultural critic who’s recently relocated from Melbourne to Los Angeles. Chris and Sylvère have spent Sylvère’s sabbatical at a cabin in Crestline, a small town in the San Bernardino Mountains some 90 minutes from Los Angeles. Since Sylvère begins teaching again in January, they will soon be returning to New York. Over dinner the two men discuss recent trends in postmodern critical theory and Chris, who is no intellectual, notices Dick making continual eye contact with her. Dick’s attention makes her feel powerful, and when the check comes she takes out her Diners Club card. Please, she says. Let me pay. The radio predicts snow on the San Bernardino highway. Dick generously invites them both to spend the night at his home in the Antelope Valley desert, some 30 miles away.

Chris wants to separate herself from her coupleness, so she sells Sylvère on the thrill of riding in Dick’s magnificent vintage Thunderbird convertible. Sylvère, who doesn’t know a T-bird from a hummingbird and doesn’t care, agrees, bemused. Done. Dick gives her copious, concerned directions. Don’t worry, she interrupts, flashing hair and smiles, I’ll tail you. And she does. Slightly buzzed and keeping the accelerator of her pickup truck steady, she’s reminded of a performance she did called Car Chase at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York when she was 23. She and her friend Liza Martin had tailed the steelily good-looking driver of a Porsche all the way through Connecticut on Highway 95. Finally he’d pulled over to a rest stop, but when Liza and Chris got out he drove off. The performance ended with Liza accidentally-but-really stabbing Chris’ hand onstage with a kitchen knife. Blood flowed, and everyone found Liza dazzlingly sexy and dangerous and beautiful. Liza, belly popping out of a fuzzy midriff top, fish-net legs tearing up against her green vinyl miniskirt as she rocked back to show her crotch, looked like the cheapest kind of whore. A star is born. No one at the show that night had found Chris’ pale anemic looks and piercing gaze remotely endearing. Could anyone? It was a question that’d temporarily been shelved. But now it was a whole new world. The request line on 92.3 The Beat was thumping, Post-Riot Los Angeles, a city strung on fiber optic nerves. Dick’s Thunderbird was always somewhere in her line of sight, the two vehicles strung invisibly together across the concrete riverbed of highway, like John Donne’s eyeballs. And this time Chris was alone.

Back at Dick’s, the night unfolds like the boozy Christmas Eve in Eric Rohmer’s film My Night At Maud’s. Chris notices that Dick is flirting with her, his vast intelligence straining beyond the po-mo rhetoric and words to evince some essential loneliness that only she and he can share. Chris giddily responds. At 2 a.m., Dick plays them a video of himself dressed as Johnny Cash commissioned by English public television. He’s talking about earthquakes and upheaval and his restless longing for a place called home. Chris’ response to Dick’s video, though she does not articulate it at the time, is complex. As an artist she finds Dick’s work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active. (Years later Chris would realize that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre’s attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junky: bad characters invite invention.) But Chris keeps these thoughts to herself. Because she does not express herself in theoretical language, no one expects too much from her and she is used to tripping out on layers of complexity in total silence. Chris’ unarticulated double-flip on Dick’s video draws her even closer to him. She dreams about him all night long. But when Chris and Sylvère wake up on the sofabed the next morning, Dick is gone.

December 4, 1994: 10 a.m.

Sylvère and Chris leave Dick’s house, reluctantly, alone that morning. Chris rises to the challenge of extemporizing the Thank You Note, which must be left behind. She and Sylvère have breakfast at the Antelope IHOP. Because they are no longer having sex, the two maintain their intimacy via deconstruction: i.e., they tell each other everything. Chris tells Sylvère how she believes that she and Dick have just experienced a Conceptual Fuck. His disappearance in the morning clinches it, and invests it with a subcultural subtext she and Dick both share: she’s reminded of all the fuzzy one-time fucks she’s had with men who’re out the door before her eyes are open. She recites a poem by Barbara Barg on this subject to Sylvère:

What do you do with a Kerouac

But go back and back to the sack

with Jack

How do you know when Jack

has come?

You look on your pillow and

Jack is gone…

And then there was the message on Dick’s answerphone. When they came into the house, Dick took his coat off, poured them drinks and hit the Play button. The voice of a very young, very Californian woman came on:

Hi Dick, this’s Kyla. Dick, I—I’m sorry to keep calling you at home, and now I’ve got your answering machine and, and I just wanted to say I’m sorry how things didn’t work out the other night, and—I know it’s not your fault, but I guess all I really wanted was just to thank you for being such a nice person…

Now I’m totally embarrassed, Dick mumbled charmingly, opening the vodka. Dick is 46 years old. Does this message mean he’s lost? And, if Dick is lost, could he be saved by entering a conceptual romance with Chris? Was the conceptual fuck merely the first step? For the next few hours, Sylvère and Chris discuss this.

December 4, 1994: 8 p.m.

Back in Crestline, Chris can’t stop thinking about last night with Dick. So she starts to write a story about it, called Abstract Romanticism. It’s the first story she’s written in five years.

It started in the restaurant, she begins. It was the beginning of the evening and we were all laughing a bit too much.

She addresses this story, intermittently, to David Rattray because she’s convinced that David’s ghost had been with her last night for the car ride, pushing her pickup truck further all the way up Highway 5. Chris, David’s ghost and the truck had merged into a single unit moving forward.

Last night I felt, she wrote to David’s ghost, like I do at times when things seem to open onto new vistas of excitement—that you were here: floating dense beside me, set someplace between my left ear and my shoulder, compressed like thought.

She thought about David all the time. It was uncanny how Dick had said somewhere in last night’s boozy conversation, as if he’d read her mind, how much he admired David’s book. David Rattray had been a reckless adventurer and a genius and a moralist, indulging in the most improbable infatuations nearly until the moment of his death at age 57. And now Chris felt David’s ghost pushing her to understand infatuation, how the loved person can become a holding pattern for all the tattered ends of memory, experience and thought you’ve ever had. So she started to describe Dick’s face, pale and mobile, good bones, reddish hair and deepset eyes. Writing, Chris held his face in her mind, and then the telephone rang and it was Dick.

Chris was so embarrassed. She wondered if the call was really for Sylvère, but Dick didn’t ask for him, so she stayed on the scratchy line. Dick was phoning to explain his disappearance the night before. He’d gotten up early and drove out to Pear Blossom to pick up some eggs and bacon. I’m a bit of an insomniac, you know. When he’d gotten home to Antelope Valley he was genuinely surprised to find them gone.

At this moment, Chris could’ve told Dick her own farfetched interpretation: had she, this story would’ve taken another turn. But there was so much static on the line, and already she was afraid of him. She feverishly considered proposing another meeting, but she didn’t, and then Dick got off the phone. Chris stood in her makeshift office, sweating. Then she ran upstairs to find Sylvère.

December 5, 1994

Alone in Crestline, Sylvère and Chris spent most of last night (Sunday) and this morning (Monday) talking about Dick’s 3 minute call. Why does Sylvère entertain this? It could be that for the first time since last summer, Chris seems animated and alive, and since he loves her, Sylvère can’t bear to see her sad. It could be he’s reached an impasse with the book he’s writing on modernism and the holocaust, and dreads returning next month to his teaching job. It could be that he’s perverse.

December 6–8, 1994

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday of this week pass unrecorded, blurred. If memory serves, Tuesday that term was the day that Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer spent in Pasadena, teaching at Art Center College of Design. Shall we attempt a reconstruction? They get up at 8, drive down the hill from Crestline, grab coffee in San Bernardino, hop on the 215 to the 10 and drive for 90 minutes, hitting LA just after traffic. It’s likely they talked about Dick for most of the ride. However, since they planned to move out of Crestline in just 10 days, on December 14 (Sylvère to Paris for the holidays, Chris to New York), they must’ve also briefly talked logistics. A Restless Longing…driving through Fontana and Pomona, through a landscape that meant nothing, with an inconclusive future looming. While Sylvère lectured on poststructuralism, Chris drove out to Hollywood to pick up some publicity photos for her film and shopped for cheese at Trader Joe’s. Then they drove back out to Crestline, winding up the mountain through darkness and thick fog.

Wednesday and Thursday disappear. It’s obvious that Chris’ new film isn’t going to go very far. What will she do next? Her first experience in art had been as a participant in some druggy psychodramas of the ’70s. The idea that Dick may’ve proposed a kind of game between them is incredibly exciting. She explains it over and over to Sylvère. She begs Sylvère to phone him, fish around for some sign that Dick’s aware of her. And if there is, she’ll call.

Friday, December 9, 1994

Sylvère, a European intellectual who teaches Proust, is skilled in the analysis of love’s minutiae. But how long can anyone continue analyzing a single evening and a 3-minute call? Already, Sylvère’s left two unanswered messages on Dick’s answerphone. And Chris has turned into a jumpy bundle of emotions, sexually aroused for the first time in seven years. So on Friday morning, Sylvère finally suggests that Chris write Dick a letter. Since she’s embarrassed she asks him if he wants to write one too. Sylvère agrees.

Do married couples usually collaborate on billets doux? If Sylvère and Chris were not so militantly opposed to psychoanalysis, they might’ve seen this as a turning point.

EXHIBIT A:   CHRIS AND SYLVÈRE’S FIRST LETTERS

Crestline, California

December 9, 1994

Dear Dick,

It must be the desert wind that went to our heads that night or maybe the desire to fictionalize life a little bit. I don’t know. We’ve met a few times and I’ve felt a lot of sympathy towards you and a desire to be closer. Though we come from different places, we’ve both tried breaking up with our pasts. You’re a cowboy; for ten years, I was a nomad in New York.

So let’s go back to the evening at your house: the glorious ride in your Thunderbird from Pasadena to the End of the World, I mean the Antelope Valley. It’s a meeting we postponed almost a year. And truer than I imagined. But how did I get into that?

I want to talk about that evening at your house. I had a feeling that somehow I knew you and we could just be what we are together. But now I’m sounding like the bimbo whose voice we heard, unwittingly, that night on your answerphone…

Sylvère

Crestline, California

December 9, 1994

Dear Dick,

Since Sylvère wrote the first letter, I’m thrown into this weird position. Reactive—like Charlotte Stant to Sylvère’s Maggie Verver, if we were living in the Henry James novel The Golden Bowl—the Dumb Cunt, a factory of emotions evoked by all the men. So the only thing that I can do is tell The Dumb Cunt’s Tale. But how?

Sylvère thinks it’s nothing more than a perverse longing for rejection, the love I feel for you. But I disagree, at bottom I’m a very romantic girl. What touched me were all the windows of vulnerability in your house…so Spartan and self-conscious. The propped up Some Girls album cover, the dusky walls—how out of date and déclassé. But I’m a sucker for despair, for faltering—that moment when the act breaks down, ambition fails. I love it and feel guilty for perceiving it and then the warmest indescribable affection floods in to drown the guilt. For years I adored Shake Murphy in New Zealand for these reasons, a hopeless case. But you’re not exactly hopeless: you have a reputation, self-awareness and a job, and so it occurred to me that there might be something to be learned by both of us from playing out this romance in a mutually self-conscious way. Abstract romanticism?

It’s weird, I never really wondered whether I’m ‘your type.’ (’Cause in the past, Empirical Romance, since I’m not pretty or maternal, I never am the type for Cowboy Guys.) But maybe action’s all that really matters now. What people do together overshadows Who They Are. If I can’t make you fall in love with me for who I am, maybe I can interest you with what I understand. So instead of wondering ‘Would he like me?’, I wonder ‘Is he game?’

When you called on Sunday night, I was writing a description of your face. I couldn’t talk, and hung up on the bottom end of the romantic equation with beating heart and sweaty palms. It’s incredible to feel this way. For 10 years my life’s been organized around avoiding this painful elemental state. I wish that I could dabble like you do around romantic myths. But I can’t, because I always lose and already in the course of this three-day totally fictitious romance, I’ve started getting sick. And I wonder if there’ll ever be a possibility of reconciling youth and age, or the anorexic open wound I used to be with the money-hustling hag that I’ve become. We suicide ourselves for our own survival. Is there any hope of dipping back into the past and circling round it like you can in art?

Sylvère, who’s typing this, says this letter lacks a point. What reaction am I looking for? He thinks this letter is too literary, too Baudrillardian. He says I’m squashing out all the trembly little things he found so touching. It’s not the Dumb Cunt Exegesis he expected. But Dick, I know that as you read this, you’ll know these things are true. You understand the game is real, or even better than, reality, and better than is what it’s all about. What sex is better than drugs, what art is better than sex? Better than means stepping out into complete intensity. Being in love with you, being ready to take this ride, made me feel 16, hunched up in a leather jacket in a corner with my friends. A timeless fucking image. It’s about not giving a fuck, or seeing all the consequences looming and doing something anyway. And I think you—I—keep looking for that and it’s thrilling when you find it in other people.

Sylvère thinks he’s that kind of anarchist. But he’s not. I love you Dick.

Chris

But after finishing these, Chris and Sylvère both felt they could do better. That there were things still left to say. So they began a second round, spending most of Friday sitting on their living room floor in Crestline passing the laptop back and forth. And they each wrote a second letter, Sylvère about jealousy, Chris about the Ramones and the Kierkegaardian third remove. Maybe I’d like to be like you, Sylvère wrote, "living all alone in a house surrounded by a cemetery. I mean, why not take the shortcut? So I got really involved in the fantasy, erotically too, because desire radiates, even if it is not directed towards you, and it has an energy and beauty, and I think I was turned on to Chris being turned on to you. After awhile it became difficult to remember that nothing really happened. I guess in some dark corner of my mind I realized if I wasn’t going to be jealous, my only choice was to enter this fictional liaison in a sort of perverse fashion. How else could I take my wife having a crush on you? The thoughts that come to mind are pretty distasteful: ménage à trois, the willing husband…all three of us are too sophisticated to deal in such dreary archetypes. Were we trying to open up new ground? Your cowboy persona meshed so well with the dreams Chris has of the torn and silent desperate men she’s been rejected by. The fact that you don’t return messages turns your answerphone into a blank screen onto which we can project our fantasies. So in a sense I did encourage Chris, because thanks to you, she’s been reminded of a bigger picture, the way she was last month after visiting Guatemala, and we’re all potentially bigger people than we are. There’s so much we haven’t talked about. But maybe that’s just the way to become closer friends. To share thoughts that may not be shared…"

Chris’ second letter was less noble. She started off by rhapsodizing once again about Dick’s face: "I started looking at your face that night in the restaurant—oh wow, isn’t that like the first line in the Ramones song, Needles & Pins? ‘I saw your face/It was the face I loved/And I knew’—and I got the same feeling from it that I get every-time I hear that song, and when you called my heart was pounding and then I thought that maybe we could do something together, something that is to adolescent romance what the Ramone’s cover of the song is to the original. The Ramones give Needles & Pins the possibility of irony, but the irony doesn’t undercut the song’s emotion, it makes it stronger and more true. Søren Kierkegaard called this the Third Remove. In his book The Crisis In The Life Of An Actress, he claims no actress can play 14-year-old Juliette until she’s at least 32. Because acting’s art, and art involves reaching through some distance. Playing the vibrations between here and there and then and now. And don’t you think reality is best attained through dialectics? PS, Your face is mobile, craggy, beautiful…"

By the time Sylvère and Chris finish their second letters, it’s the end of the afternoon. Lake Gregory shimmers in the distance, ringed by snowy mountains. The landscape’s fiery and distant. For now both of them are satisfied. Memories of domesticity when Chris was young, 20 years before: a China eggcup and a teacup, painted people circling around it, blue and white. A bluebird at the bottom of the cup, seen through amber tea. All the prettiness in the world contained in these two objects. When Chris and Sylvère put away the Toshiba laptop it’s already dark. She fixes dinner. He returns to working on his book.

EXHIBIT B:   HYSTERIA

PART 1. SYLVÈRE FLIPS OUT

Crestline, California

December 10, 1994

Dear Dick,

This morning I woke up with an idea. Chris should send you a short note breaking out of this stuffy, referential delirium. Here’s how it should read:

Dear Dick, l am taking Sylvère to the airport Wednesday morning. I need to talk to you. Can we meet at your place?

Love,

Chris

I thought it was a brilliant coup: a piece of reality shattering this twisted hotbed of emotions. Because after all, our letters were so self directed, marriage a deux. Actually that’s the title I thought of for this piece before I went to sleep and I wanted to communicate it to Chris as soon as she woke up. But it had the opposite effect. After last night’s brainstorming, she’d somehow put aside her infatuation with you. She was back on the safe side—marriage, art, the family—but my concern reignited her obsession and suddenly we were thrown back into the reality of unreality, the challenge at the bottom of it all. Outwardly it has to do with Chris’ apprehension about turning 40, or so she says. I’m afraid my letters have been too high-minded and patronizing. Anyway, let me try again—

Sylvère

California scrubjays screeched outside the master bedroom. Sylvère sat propped against two pillows, typing, looking out through the glass doors across the deck. No matter how many times