Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

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.

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.

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.

Dear Dick,

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

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.

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.

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.

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?