The Correspondence Artist

by Barbara Browning

  We were planning a visit. Tzipi was spending a few weeks on Mykonos, working on the manuscript of Problems are Defiant like Unattractive Angels. She’d rented a little villa that had a guestroom. She invited me to spend a few days with her. The messages Tzipi sent me from Greece were glorious. Of course we talked more about Sappho, and about Nietzsche. She shares my enthusiasm for The Birth of Tragedy. I told her that from a distance, before I met her, she’d always struck me as a Bacchante, but when I got to know her I realized how Apollinian she was. She said, “Oh, I am very Apollinian.” I told her about a film documentation I’d seen of Richard Schechner’s famous theatrical production, Dionysus in ’69. The actual production was done in 1968. It was based on The Bacchae, but the hippie actors would suddenly slip out of character and say their real names and talk like cool cats, and make references to sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. They acted out a Native American birthing ritual in the nude, and then they started playing bongo drums and making out with the audience. The film was shot by Brian de Palma before he became famous. I guess then he was just a guy with a camera – or actually, two cameras. It was a split screen. The whole thing was very hallucinogenic and sexy and could never happen today. I’m kind of jealous that Tzipi got to be a part of that generation.

  I sent her an image from Dionysus in ’69 which I found very beautiful. It’s the birthing ceremony:

  I said I knew it was funny for me to be sending this image enthusiastically, because I’d earlier had that exchange with her about how I found the idea of group sex overly distracting. That exchange about “focus.” I, who seemed so Apollinian, was showing my Dionysian side. And she, who really looked the part of the Bacchante, had come out as Apollinian.

  Tzipi quoted to me a passage from The Birth of Tragedy about a counterintuitive optical phenomenon: “When after a forceful attempt to gaze on the sun we turn away blinded, we see darkcolored spots before our eyes, as a cure, as it were. Conversely, the bright image projections of the Sophoclean hero – in short, the Apollinian aspect of the mask – are necessary effects of a glance into the inside and terrors of nature; as it were, luminous spots to cure eyes damaged by gruesome night.”

  She wrote me some other beautiful things – about the ocean, about the smell of salt and the shock of the white villas against the intense turquoise sky, about the lemony taste of the fish and the calm of the nights there, about how she wanted to touch my thighs and my belly and feel my small, hard nipple between her lips. She also told me there was a local girl named Melina who’d developed an obsession with her. Tzipi told me it was entertaining at first because she was pretty and had big brown eyes and a nice ass and she liked to dance around the terrace for Tzipi but it was a little hard to get her to leave after fucking and she’d told her I was coming and pretty soon she was going to have to clear out and she’d cried. Tzipi told me she was telling me this because she wanted to tell me everything as it was a way of being close to me. That was the one message from Greece that didn’t make me feel particularly close to her, but as I said, she’s been honest with me every step of the way.

  When I flew in to Athens, I had about a four hour layover. I checked my BlackBerry. We don’t need to go over what was on there. On Mykonos, I got a taxi out to the villa. She wasn’t there but the door was open. The place was kind of a mess. That surprised me a little but I figured she’d been concentrating on writing the novel. I found the guestroom and began to make myself at home. I took a shower. I put on those thigh-high stockings, my black lace panties, and a little black shift. I put on make-up. I lay on the bed and waited. I checked the BlackBerry. Nothing. I texted Sandro and told him to study hard for his algebra exam. It got dark and I drifted off for a little bit. When I heard the door to the patio open, I was sure it was Tzipi, but it wasn’t.

  Tzipi was just arriving in Athens, having written me that Melina was having a very inconvenient reaction to being dumped. She told me not to bother to catch the connecting flight, that she’d already booked us adjoining rooms at the King George in Athens, and it was too bad I’d missed the villa but she couldn’t wait to show me the Acropolis anyway. And she said that even if she couldn’t be stroking my pussy on Mykonos as we’d planned, we’d be together tonight in Athens and it gave her a very hard wood just thinking about it.

  CHAPTER 3: ANIMAL CRACKERS

  I think I’d like to explain that earlier comment I made about bonobos. If you’ll recall, a couple of years ago I sent an e-mail to Binh with an obscene picture of a female bonobo masturbating. I got the picture off the internet. Here it is:

  I sent it because we’d recently had a humorous exchange about bonobos and sex. It was during one of our discussions of sexual jealousy. He’d shared with me some anecdote about a recent adventure he’d had, and he expressed interest in hearing about my own activities. He said hearing about that kind of thing turned him on. By now you’ve observed that my sex life is, as it were, a half-open book, but I wasn’t quite so sure that all this sharing of details between us was a good idea. I said that I thought that sexual possessiveness was politically objectionable and a bad idea in practical terms, but that didn’t mean I didn’t experience a twinge of it sometimes. I wondered if his own desire to hear about my sex with other people wasn’t just a little masochistic.

  He answered by saying his attitude toward the subject was very much like that of bonobos. He explained that bonobo males frequently deal with sexual jealousy by sending away the female under dispute, and then seeking out the male rival. Then the two males have sex together. It seems this resolves the tension. He said that the females sometimes did something along these lines, but with less frequency. Evidently, the females just generally rub their vulvas up against other females’ vulvas in an ordinary, friendly way, so they don’t need triangulation as an excuse. (He also described the male-on-male maneuvers most typically performed: back-to-back, they rub their scrotal sacks together.) Binh said that bonobos were famous for resolving all kinds of social conflict through sex, as opposed to violence.

  I found this compelling. I did a little internet research, and everything seemed to confirm what Binh had said. This being an historic moment of clearly regrettable decisions regarding political violence as a means to “resolve” social conflict, it was hard not to agree that the bonobos seemed to have found a better way. I also, as I wrote Binh, did an image search on Google, which is where I discovered this astonishing picture of the female masturbating. As you would expect, I experienced a profound sense of identification when I saw her.

  There were only two problems with this whole exchange. The first was that, in spite of the heartening story of the bonobos’ political life, I still found Binh’s anecdotes regarding his sexual adventures to be a little bit painful. The second was that he didn’t leave well enough alone with the compelling story above. He wanted to push the human-animal sexual comparison a little further, and pretty soon he was citing Darwin in order to suggest that it was “natural” that I would experience somewhat more discomfort around sexual jealousy than he because (I’m sure you’ve heard this argument before) in evolutionary terms, women stood a better chance of reproducing through monogamous, consistent sexual relations than men, whose chances increase if they spread around their seed.

  While I was happy to identify with the female bonobo in that photograph, I was entirely disinclined to buy into the all-toofamiliar Darwin story. While I’ve already told you that Binh is a genius, there are times he says things that make him look really dumb. Or maybe just really young.

  In October of 1948, Simone de Beauvoir wrote to Nelson Algren, “Honey, did you really fall on the head at eight months old? It would explain many things.”

  Despite some evidence of immaturity, I have to admit, Binh is a very good father. You should see him hopping around like a frog with Bao and Bob. When he’s with the kids, all his more trivial preoccupations seem to evaporate. He handles their little bodies with such confident tenderness. They climb on him and nuzzle into his neck.
He cooks them mashed organic yams, reads them stories, tickles them just enough, brushes their tiny teeth, and puts them to sleep by lying down with them and softly stroking their coppery hair and measuring his breathing against theirs. He loves them so much.

  He’s always a little sad when it’s time to send them back to their mother’s house. But then he gets back to his more mundane preoccupations: having his photo taken for the Gap ad campaign; deciding whether to sign that public letter on Darfur; rescheduling a “play date” with those two young art students he met when he gave a crit at the UdK; editing the new music video for Ponytail; figuring out whether to go to Dieter’s party for Lenny Kravitz (Aafke might show up).

  And of course, there’s his art. You must be wondering about that night at Propeller Island. You’ll recall that we left Binh sleeping peacefully in his padded cell, while I, like our female bonobo friend in the photograph, attempted to take care of myself. But while she appears to be utterly unselfconscious, tranquil, and self-possessed, my own activities in the lion cage were anxious, theatrical, thrashing, and pitiful.

  There was more to the spam-trapped e-mail. For once, Binh had decided to incorporate our romance into a conceptual art project. And yet I was still not to appear. He explained that he’d had a huge screen erected in Potsdamer Platz, with a high-power digital projector located across the plaza. He’d carefully positioned four surveillance cameras inside the lion cage at different strategic angles. These were hooked up for a live-feed to the Potsdamer Platz projector. The project, part of his new “Nocturnal Emissions” series, was to begin at midnight. Alternating in one-minute intervals between the perspectives of the four surveillance cameras, the live-feed would project various lonely images of the empty cage where we had planned to meet, but didn’t, with a scrolling text at the bottom of the screen saying, “Picture me having sex with my lover in the room next door.”

  Of course, everything went as planned for the first hour and fifteen minutes. Binh had dropped off to sleep waiting for me. He’s not the type to get particularly worked up about a friend’s tardy arrival, and there’s something very soporific, I’m sure you can imagine, about lying around in a padded cell. It obviously wasn’t going to make a big difference for the projection if we actually were or weren’t having sex in the room for crazy people.

  When I entered the cage and began my little call-of-the-wild routine, it took a few minutes for anybody to even notice what was going on. The intern manning the projector positioned in a fifteenth floor office across the plaza was drinking a can of pilsner and playing Tetris on his cell phone. Then there was a bit of confusion when he got a call from security, and wondered if he should call and wake the curator to ask if Binh had mentioned a change of plans. When he did call, the curator hesitated for a moment, and then decided, reasonably, that it would be easier to claim technical difficulties and shut the thing down than to risk obscenity charges.

  I was only really up on that massive screen for a total of about six minutes. The video and stills captured on the digital devices of curious passersby were fortunately censored before they could make it to YouTube, and besides, the surveillance camera images were highly pixelated. I wouldn’t have been recognizable to anybody except maybe Sandro and Florence, who knew about my costuming plans. The whole thing blew over fairly quickly, and Binh wasn’t even particularly disturbed to lose sponsorship for the “Nocturnal Emissions” series which, he ultimately decided (and rightly, I have to say) was a trite idea.

  “Auf anderthalb Meter hohen Stelzen stehen die beiden Käfige im Zentrum der großzügigen Manege und warten auf den Applaus vom Nachbargast. Ihr Vorhang entscheidet, was das Publikum sieht! ”

  It’s funny that while Binh claims to be “Swedish-Vietnamese,” I am, in fact, the one with a Swedish grandmother. As I’m sure you know, there’s a large Scandinavian population in the Midwest. I don’t have those extreme Nordic looks that Aafke does. My eyes aren’t pale blue like hers, but a kind of indeterminate greenish-grey. My skin is actually a little tawny, and my hair is brown. In fact, of all of my grandparents, my Swedish grandmother was the darkest one. She was olive-skinned, with black eyes and black hair. My mother vaguely explained this at some point in my childhood. She said something about how the Vikings had gone raping and pillaging a lot of “island maidens,” leaving some of us Swedes with these traces of those other exotic realms.

  In the course of my relationship with Binh, Sandro, of course, has been growing up. Maybe you’ve registered some qualms that I communicate as openly as I do with him about certain aspects of my personal life. But Sandro also has that “old soul” thing going on. In fact, sometimes I think he’s a little more mature than Binh. He’s also pretty sexually precocious. He lost his virginity a few months ago.

  Of course, the whole concept of “virginity” I find entirely suspect. I wrote about this to Binh. It followed a brief, flirtatious exchange we’d had about a couple of sexual possibilities we hadn’t yet actualized with each other. And never would. Perhaps it will surprise you to learn, after reading that Binh wrote so enthusiastically about the creative bonobo maneuvers, that there are other acts, besides fellatio, that leave him cold.

  Monday, November 5, 2007, 2:43 p.m.

  Subject: eye contact

  And speaking of squeamish, you crack me up with your cups of tea. I think it’s also hilarious that you claim to be so much more homosexual than me. Je crois que je suis bien plus pédée que tu es lesbien.

  I had a beautiful conversation with Sandro about sex. I said that I thought it was great that he’d had sex with his girlfriend, but that in fact, it was very arbitrary to think that the penisvagina sex act was “real” sex. They’d already done everything you can do with the combination mouth – fingers – vagina – penis, except for that. Now there’s that. I said that the truth was that these other things could be even more intimate. He said, “Yeah, it’s true, and who said that sex had to be through touch? What about eye contact? Or talking?” But he’s very happy to have put his penis in her vagina.

  I was teasing you when I called you Anaïs Nin. Besides, I like Anaïs Nin.

  You may be getting increasingly uncomfortable about the juxtaposition of writing about sex with my lover with writing about my son. Indeed, this may well be worrisome. Perhaps it’s even more worrisome that the photograph I showed you of “Binh’s nipple” – the one that looked like an eye – in fact belonged to Sandro. The other morning when he was dressing for school I said, “Before you put on your shirt, can I take a picture of your nipple? It’s for the novel I’m writing. Binh is supposed to send me a picture of his nipple in an e-mail.”

  In addition to the fact that this little role-play game is of questionable taste, it is really ballsy of me to pretend to be a digital art star, with my little pink Sony Cyber-shot, an antiquated webcam, and some cheapo digital image enhancement software that came with tacky templates for greeting cards and calendars. Florence, who is a painter, has pointed out to me that the “hot young art star” is probably the most clichéd and overdone character in this novel.

  The truth is, the paramour has never sent me a digital image in an e-mail – much less a .mov file. I, on the other hand, have sent any number of pictures. As I said, I decapitate the dirty ones. I have sent my own nipple. But I send pictures of a lot of other things. Bonobos. Some of my vaguely perverse knitting and crochet projects. Sexual looking flowers.

  Actually, it began with flowers. It was toward the beginning of our correspondence, and I was still trying to suss out to what degree the paramour was interested in something romantic, or at least sexual, with me. In a gesture of friendliness, I’d offered to send an iPod holder I’d crocheted. I said, “If you don’t want to carry an iPod in it, you can use it to hold a pack of cigarettes (but don’t smoke).” We were still exchanging information about some of our habits, our basic likes and dislikes, our intellectual and aesthetic stances, and desires. I couldn’t ask outright, of course, about sex. So I sent this e-mail:r />
  Sunday, July 31, 2005, 5:16 p.m.

  Subject: pure or impure

  It’s only fair that you should make some mistakes in English, since I make mistakes all the time in French.

  I think it’s funny and nice you don’t have an iPod. I’m very happy you don’t smoke. I didn’t think so. If you have to have one of these habits, I recommend the iPod.

  You and Sandro like Beethoven. I prefer Bach. Monk and Evans and the rest, this was also my formation. After I discovered Steve Reich in college, I became interested in West African music. I vaguely know some of the rockers you mentioned.

  It’s beautiful here. Yesterday I spent the day shopping at the farmers’ market and gardening on the terrace. I wanted to send you a picture of a flower. I couldn’t decide: pure or impure? So I’m sending both. One I grew and one I bought.

  I hope you’re not offended by dirty pictures.

  I appended a shot of the perky little smiley-faced pansies from my balcony, and the scandalously sexual iris I’d bought. The paramour played dumb, merely responding that there was nothing “dirty” about these photos – they were merely “sensual,” as flowers often were, “principally orchids.”

  It wasn’t until we’d actually slept together a couple of months later that I started considering sending impure pictures of myself. Actually, they were very pure. Even the one of my labia. That labial flower from the farmers’ market was much more obscene.