Chris Kraus: I Love Dick

D:Maybe the timing isn’t great but the timing never is, I suppose. Let’s think about it and I’ll give you a call tomorrow.

S:Okay we’ll be here all day.

D:Thank you for letting me in on the secret. I will think about it. Bye bye.

S:Okay you too. Yes don’t tell anyone. Take care. Bye bye.

And then Chris went alone into her room and wrote a letter, thinking she would send it, about sex and love. She was all confused about wanting to have sex, sensing that at this point if she slept with Dick the whole thing would be over. THE—UNEXAMINED—LIFE—IS NOT—WORTH—LIVING flashed the titles of a Ken Kobland film against the backbeat of a carfuck 1950s song. “As soon as sex takes place, we fall,” she wrote, thinking, knowing from experience, that sex short circuits all imaginative exchange. The two together get too scary. So she wrote some more about Henry James. Although she really wanted both. “Is there a way,” she wrote in closing, “to dignify sex, make it as complicated as we are, to make it not grotesque?”

Sylvère must’ve known that she was writing and at the same moment, in his room, he wrote:

“Dear Dick, it’s funny how things have a way of turning around. Just when I thought I was taking some initiative I find myself in the position of the Dumb Dick, pushed around by other people’s drives. Actually what hurt me most was how confused and disoriented Chris was, reverting to her reaction to younger crushes that I wasn’t around to witness the first time. And then the difference between our ages widened to the half century. And I felt old and sad. And yet we’re sharing something.”

And yet being together as a couple was all either of them could imagine. Did they read their “private” letters to each other out loud? Probably. And then they made love, thinking about what? The absent Dick? At any rate they were on the bus again, committed to the game. Lying in bed beside Sylvère, Chris wrote this post-coital letter:

Crestline, California

December 10, 1994

Dear Dick,

It’s several hours later and we’ve just had sex and before that spent the last two hours talking about you. Since you’ve come into our lives our house has turned into a brothel. We smoke cigarettes, knock ashtrays over without picking them up, lay around for hours. We’ve only worked halfheartedly and for a few hours at a time. We’ve lost all interest in packing for the move, or trips ahead, the future, consolidating our possessions or moving forward with our work and our careers. It isn’t fair that you’re so unaffected. Are you spending Saturday night thinking about Sylvère’s phone call? I doubt it. Sylvère says you’re right to tune it out, because this correspondence has nothing to do with you. He says it’s just about us as a couple, but that’s not true.

When I was 23 my best friend Liza Martin and I invited a famous rock star known for his forays into the bizarre to fuck us as if we were one person. Under the guidance of two artists we revered, Richard Schechner and Louise Bourgeois, we’d been developing a schizophrenic twin act in the backrooms of several topless bars (Oops the phone is ringing. Is it you? No, it’s just another fax about the fucked up EDL of my movie from the negative cutter in New Zealand, which I’ve become so indifferent to.) Anyway we told him Liza’d do the physical part of sex, I’d do the verbal. Together we incarnated the cyborgian split projected on all females by this culture. We even offered ——his choice of venue: the Gramercy Park Hotel or the Chelsea. But ——never answered. Easier I guess to fuck a bimbo than get involved with such weird girls.

And now Sylvère and I are the weird girls. I never dreamed I’d do anything like this again, especially never with Sylvère. But frankly I feel like I’ve come to the end of something with the movie. I don’t know what will happen next and maybe you’ve fallen into the vacuum. Don’t you think the only way of truly understanding things is through Case Studies? I read a book last month about the Guatemalan Coca Cola strike by Henry Frundt: a total reconstruction of events through documents and transcripts. By understanding one simple thing—a strike—it’s possible to understand everything about corporate capitalism in third world countries. Anyway I think a case study is what we’ve started to create with you.

I feel like I’m awaiting an execution. Probably all this will come screeching to a halt tomorrow morning when you call. There’re just a few hours left for the whole story (what story?) to unfold.

Crestline, California

December 10, 1994

Dear Dick,

I wonder what I’d do if I were you.

PS: We decided we will leave you alone for the rest of the night.

They were delirious, ecstatic. Chris had wished so many times that she could reach inside Sylvère’s head or heart and exorcize his unhappiness. On Saturday, December 10, they rested, blissful and exhausted, finally inhabiting the same space at the same time.

THE LONGEST SUNDAY IN THE WORLD

Crestline, California

December 11, 1994: Sunday morning

Dear Dick,

I guess it’s been a case of infatuation . Funny I haven’t thought to use that word before.

You are the fourth and a half person (Shake, the Good Yvonne, the Bad Yvonne and David B., the Jesuit) I’ve been infatuated with since living with Sylvère. Mostly this infatuation-energy is about wanting to know someone.

It’s funny, with the two Yvonnes, the sex-infatuation part came after already knowing them quite well, adoring them and wanting to be with them in other ways. Whereas the sex-infatuations that’re male (you, Shake, the priest) leap out of nowhere, based on not knowing them at all. As if sex could provide the missing clues. Can it? In the cases of the males it’s like I felt some kind of hint of who that person was floating underneath the surface. Wanting sex to realize things I knew.

Before I got together with Sylvère I’d usually get dumped by guys as soon as they found someone else more feminine or bovine. “She’s not like you,” they’d say. “She is a truly nice girl.” And it hurt ’cause what turned me on in sex was believing that they knew me, that I’d found somebody to understand. But now that I’ve become a hag, i.e., accepted all the contradictions of my life, there’s nothing left to know. The only thing that moves me now is moving, finding out about another person (you).

I know how lame these letters are. Still, I wanted to use the last few hours before your call to tell you how I feel,

Crestline, California

December 11, 1994

Dear Dick,

We’re under the gun now. In a few hours you might blow our whole story into shreds and reveal it for what it is: a strange perverse machine to get to know you, Dick. Oh Dick, what am I doing here? How did I ever get into this strange, embarrassing situation, telling you on the phone about my wife’s infatuation with you? (I’m calling her my “wife,” a word I never use, to emphasize the depth of our depravity…)

Would Chris have fallen in love with you if I hadn’t been there to make it so embarrassing? Is knowledge a desperate form of acceptance? Or does acceptance transcend itself in knowledge to reach more interesting ground? “Knowledge” is supposed to be my concern…

So I was thinking about you, longing for a crisis, a bright future to keep death away. Do we have any right to push our fantasies on you? Is there any way they can connect that would be beneficial to us all? I understand what we have to gain from it. But what would I do if I were you, Dick? If you’d wanted the complexity of human relationships you wouldn’t have moved alone out to the Antelope Valley. It reminds me of something Chris said the other day: the best place to hide a corpse is under everybody’s eyes. And you’re so close to everything but so difficult to grasp.