The Correspondence Artist

by Barbara Browning

  But what I started out saying was this: I honestly don’t feel like crying right now over the paramour. In fact, I’m feeling extremely placid about things. I told you, when I wake up, I just want to get back to thinking about Tzipi.

  I’ve gotten attached in different ways to all of the characters in this novel. Everything Santutxo’s been through fascinates me, of course, and he’s the wackiest, politically. In spite of everything, I fundamentally believe in his integrity. Even when he behaves badly – maybe especially then – I still admire that. I have the most affection for him, I think. Djeli’s so beautiful. How could you not be moved by the delicate sound of his kora, and by that voice? I realize I should be nervous about this, but I’m completely sexually fixated on Binh. Every time I start working on a section about him, I have to stop halfway through to masturbate on my bed. I touch myself imagining that .mov file of his exquisite hard-on coming to life. I imagine him imagining me touching myself. But Tzipi was the one I fell in love with. Right now, I can’t really imagine a world in which she didn’t exist. Of all of my lovers, she’s the most beautiful, the most vulnerable, the most brilliant, the most pathetic, the most loving, the most sadistic – the one closest to and furthest from the paramour. The one closest to and furthest from me.

  Yesterday I went back and listened to the original recording of “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me” by Maurice Chevalier. It’s very strange. Right in the middle he stops singing and goes into a kind of rap of the lyrics:If the nightingales could sing like you

  They’d sing much sweeter than they do

  Hmm… you brought a new kind of love to me.

  If the Sandman brought me dreams of you

  I’d want to sleep my whole life through

  (Heh heh) you brought a new kind of love to me.

  Oh, I know, I know that you’re the queen, and I’m the slave

  And yet you will understand

  That underneath it all

  You’re a maid, and I’m only… a man.

  Even with his smarmy delivery, it’s pretty stunning when he makes that little anti-slavery pitch.

  Sometimes I write things and it’s only after I sleep on them that I realize their obvious significance. This morning, for example, I woke up and saw the clear connection between the story of the beheading of Medusa, the fear of castration, and the decapitation of the dirty pictures that I send the paramour. Medusa is such a fantastic figure, because she represents both castration and a female abundant overcompensation for the absent phallus. I told you that even Tzipi was intrigued by Freud’s assertion of Medusa’s ability to turn men to stone as a sign of the “comforting erection.” Some comfort.

  Of course, I thought I was just cropping my head out of those dirty digital pictures in case my e-mails accidentally went astray. But the Medusa subplot suggests another possibility: that my missing head is not only super-phallic – it’s also capable of producing the ultimate hard-on.

  I know, I know, wishful thinking.

  I just got an e-mail from the paramour. It was very warm. It even made reference to a particular breathtaking aspect of our sex. This made me feel both affectionate and a little guilty. Before getting this e-mail, I had planned to write: Well, it’s been about ten days since I heard from the paramour and our love is looking to me like a dying houseplant. You know, the last message I’d gotten was just that short, disgruntled one about the shrink. But I wasn’t feeling sad about the lack of contact. On the contrary, I was marveling at my own canny manner of handling this situation. I was really much more preoccupied with Tzipi. So the coincidental thing about this is the explanation for the silence. What prompted this e-mail was a brief message from me saying that a colleague had just written me something mentioning the paramour, not knowing, of course, that we were intimate. What my colleague said was very complimentary. I knew that this comment would be of interest, so I passed it on. Then I said, “I think you have slipped far away right now and maybe I’ll just hear tiny things from you every once in a while but I want you to know I hope you are happy and when I think of you it’s with great tenderness.” I also said my writing was going very well. My lover responded humorously to the anecdote about my colleague, and wondered a little about what I’d said about distance, alleging not to feel overly far away, and explaining the gap in communication by saying, “I’m in love with my work right now.” And then came that tender reminiscence, nonetheless, of our particular and lovely way of fucking.

  You can see why this is a little ironic – because of course I’m also in love with my work right now, and more specifically, with Tzipi Honigman. I’m tempted to tell my lover, who claims, as you know, to enjoy hearing about these things. I’m still not sure I believe this entirely. I’d also mentioned in my message that exboyfriend who rematerialized after all these years. I don’t know if I mentioned this to be cruel or to be kind. I think I meant to be kind. I really do think of the paramour with great tenderness.

  In July of 1952, after things had already fallen apart, Simone de Beauvoir wrote to Algren: “It seems to me I put my love for you in a deep, deep freezer, and it will never get out of it, but never get rotten or dead, neither. And I’ll live with this useless deep frozen love, which is no trouble at all anyhow.”

  Over the very last few warm days of autumn, 2005, Sandro and I went out to visit friends who had a beach house on the Jersey shore. We spent a couple of nights there and it was very beautiful. I wrote Tzipi from their house.

  Friday, October 21, 2005, 11:48 p.m.

  Subject: moon

  You had asked about the moon and I forgot to tell you. For a while it was spectacular, gawdy, and then for the last couple of days it disappeared below the horizon. Do you know why that happens? I was disappointed because I was waiting for it to come back full and naked and shocking the way it looked that night from your house. Like a white lady’s belly.

  Sandro will be very impressed that you once met Jean Pierre Léaud. Yesterday he came home with his pants soaking wet and covered with sand because he’d decided to go to a deserted beach and reenact the last scene of les 400 coups where Léaud runs into the ocean and gets his feet wet.

  I send you a kiss.

  Only Tzipi could possibly understand the way the moon looked that night on her terrace in Neve Tzedek. We both saw it. It was so embarrassing. She had smilingly fingered the useless scarf and iPod holder, glanced at the unnecessary book. She took me out to show me the view. A breeze was blowing in off of Banana Beach, and you could faintly hear the hippie drummers banging on their congas in the sand. The wind was sweeping up Tzipi’s gorgeous mane of hair, and she pulled it back and twisted it into a knot. Then she stepped behind me, combed my own long hair back with her fingertips, gently twisted it behind the nape of my neck, and leaned in and kissed me warmly just below my ear. She kept holding my hair up with her left hand, and I felt her right wrap around my stomach. My sex was wet. I thought I might faint. Ten minutes later I was breathing hotly into her mouth on her bed.

  Of course Tzipi knew Jean Pierre Léaud. They actually spent about a week together on a friend’s houseboat in the south of France in the ’70s. She said he was a little crazy, but funny. That was when she still smoked.

  I had an upsetting thought. I wondered if my corresponding figure in Simone de Beauvoir’s life might not be Nelson Algren, but rather “the ugly woman,” Violette LeDuc. It’s astonishing how much Simone writes to Algren about this woman. As I mentioned, they used to meet for lunch once a month. But Simone gives much more frequent updates about her activities, always describing how this woman weeps and trembles in her presence, can’t bear to hear of her other love affairs, writes obsessively about her sexual fantasies of Simone in her diaries. Simone says of this writing in the diaries, “It is tremendously good.” She says the ugly woman writes “a beautiful language,” daring and frighteningly honest. As I also mentioned, Simone expresses disdain for most women writers, who are, she says, “a little too sweet and subtle.” The ugly w
oman, she says, “writes like a man with a very feminine sensitiveness.” Actually, that’s a better description of the paramour than it is of me.

  Thursday, December 27, 2007, 12:31 p.m.

  Subject: girl talk

  I’m worried about you. If you can, write me just to say you’re getting better. Maybe you already left for Jerusalem to see your brother. Maybe you’re all better, spending time with your family.

  All good here. Yesterday was Oscar Peterson Appreciation Day around here, because he died Sunday night. I must have listened to “Girl Talk” twenty times.

  Then in the evening Sandro and I turned out all the lights and put on The Clash and danced in the dark. That was fun.

  We watched Spartacus here at home on the big screen. Fantastic. We went to see Persepolis in the movie theater. Is it playing there? You should take Pitzi.

  Tell me if your fever’s gone down.

  Oh no. Someone just called to tell me about Benazir.

  Last winter Tzipi got the flu and it turned into a nasty upper respiratory infection. It’s difficult for me to imagine her sick, because she’s so strong. She didn’t write for over a week and I began to worry. Two days after I sent this message she wrote back weakly that she’d been “dead for the last several days.” But the fever had broken.

  The way she’d put it made me sad. And then I realized that my own message had been a little morbid, too. About Oscar Peterson having died, and then Benazir. Tzipi’s strong as a horse but she is a hypochondriac. As you know, the paramour’s afraid of dying. And in point of fact, at the age of 68, I guess it’s realistic for Tzipi to be contemplating her own mortality. That night of our first intimacy, when she was fingering the scarf and the iPod cozy, I noticed that her hands were trembling a little. I wondered to myself if she was a little nervous, or just starting to get old.

  Once, when she started going off about her discomfort at the thought of death, I told her that my prediction was that she would live to be one hundred and two. Longevity runs in her family. I told Tzipi that this was good, because that way, if we really did fall in love when I was sixty and she was eighty-three, we wouldn’t be in a hurry. There would still be plenty of time.

  In 1996, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos issued a stirring communiqué which has since been widely quoted by his followers: “The face that hides itself to be seen. The name that hides itself to be named. Behind our unnamable name, behind us, whom you see, behind us, we are you. Behind, we are the same simple, ordinary men and women, we are repeated in all races, painted in all colors, speak in all languages, and live in all places… Behind us, you are us. Behind our mask is the face of all excluded women, of all the forgotten indigenous, of all the persecuted homosexuals, of all the despised youth, of all the immigrants, of all those imprisoned for their words and votes, of all the humiliated workers, of all those dead from neglect, of all the simple and ordinary men and women who don’t count, who aren’t seen. We who are nameless.”

  Perhaps you will chafe at the suggestion that the masking of my lover’s identity has anything at all to do with politics. And you’re right. In fact, the ugly truth is that it probably has more to do with celebrity. El Sup would be appalled. Sandro was just telling me that he was watching El Sup on YouTube, and that he said something brilliant about how in the capitalist West we all care more about movie stars and whom they’ve been fucking and what they’ve been eating than we care about the struggles of the common man. Some starlet screwed her bodyguard and ate a cheeseburger last night: fascinating. El Sup said that the only time we speak of the suffering of the peasants, it’s when there’s some huge natural catastrophe. It’s true, right after the enormous earthquake in China a couple of weeks ago people looked up and said, oh, wow, 40,000 people just died.

  Take a look at the Yahoo! homepage.

  I realize this is all very self-indulgent. But you know, even Simone de Beauvoir got tired sometimes of thinking about politics. Her correspondence with Algren is full of these kinds of admissions. She’ll say, “I feel it is very silly to give so much importance to one’s own feelings when the world is so big and so many things happen: cholera in Egypt, de Gaulle in France, to say nothing about USA.” But she says what she really wants to be thinking about is lying down again with Algren: “When I’ll shut my eyes, you’ll come. Take me in your arms, give me your mouth…”

  Tuesday, September 26, 2006, 4:15 p.m.

  Subject: defense of the left

  I think I understood what you said about what you meant about equivocation, although it’s confusing, because it’s for and against it at the same time (equivocal about equivocation). You can be very confusing, which is what I love about the way you think. You’re right when you say that I shouldn’t say that we’ll always disagree about some things – in fact, you change my ideas all the time – about politics, about cinema… Sometimes then I change my mind back. Sometimes I don’t. I only get a little exaggerated like that in my attitude of “political correctness” (I hate it when you use this term) because I find it irritating when you categorically register your disillusionment with the left. Because that’s not exactly the way it is. It’s true that it’s a problem when one loses subtlety or perspective. Or a sense of humor. But the other day I was watching a documentary with Sandro about Howard Zinn (you must know who he is – a great leftist historian, an activist from my father’s generation). And an old colleague of his, a woman, said with a big smile, “It gives you so much satisfaction, to live the life of an activist, it’s so pleasurable…” It’s not all the left that’s lost its sense of irony, or humor, or pleasure, or subtlety, and it’s not all holier-than-thou.

  Hurry up and come to New York. You would love some of our funny, self-ironizing leftist friends. And I would love to lie down next to you on my soft white bed.

  I’m sending you two pure flowers.

  I attached a picture of a pink morning glory from my balcony, and another of my nipple.

  A year before the famous communiqué of the “nameless,” El Sup wrote another called “Death Has Paid a Visit.” It begins comically, noting that little pieces of his body keep falling off (chip off his shoulder, piece of thigh – will his nose be next? At least then the ski mask would lay flat…). But following his best sense of “guerrilla anatomy,” he’s been sticking them back on. This is his way of saying that he senses his own mortality. After some more surreal, politically trenchant and hysterical poetry, he modestly suggests that the government withdraw its arrest order against him, because since it was issued, “the Sup has been insufferable. And I don’t just refer to his obsession with death.” He’s constantly looking over his shoulder. He’s also started spouting weird pseudo-religious prophecies to his comrades, and sharing his plans for degenerate sex acts when he next encounters “a certain Monica or such-and-such Aimée.” Everybody would be better off, surely, if he could get the murderous government soldiers off his tail. He signs his message, “THE SUBDELINQUENT TRANSGRESSOR OF THE LAW, FLEEING THROUGH THE HILLS, SUB MARCOS.”

  Last fall Santutxo and I started debating intellectual property rights. Given his politics, you might think that he would be a big open source enthusiast. Or maybe you would think the opposite. Surprise: he argues both for and against the fierce protection of copyright. Although he expresses strong opinions, he feels a little under-informed on the topic, so I was trying to bring him up to speed. I ended up reflecting a little on the patterns of our political discussions:

  Thursday, September 27, 2007, 2:10 p.m.

  Subject: politics and eros

  Anyway, what I find fascinating about you is that even though the arguments we have are usually about race politics or sexual politics (you are less adamant about intellectual property rights so maybe we will have a real disagreement about this later but not yet), your ideas about both these things are still very complicated and interesting to me, and interrelated precisely in the realm of eros.

  This is why I said of the Communiqué on Mortality that when you
are talking about sex you are talking about politics, and vice versa.

  I’ve exchanged a couple of e-mails with my friend DJ Spooky about intellectual property rights. But nothing that I think would illuminate things for you. He just sent me a track from his new album, where he took some drum solos from Stewart Copeland, the drummer from The Police, and reproduced them by splicing together digital beats so they sound like the original but they’re not samples. He included a photo of himself with Copeland, Copeland holding Spooky’s book and smiling with his fist in the air. I guess he liked what Spooky did with his solos. You might be appalled or you might like it, I’m not sure.

  Fingerless gloves are good in cool weather when you still need to be able to use your fingers (to play piano or guitar, to hold a pen or pencil, to use a key or pick up a coin, etc.). They keep the cold wind from going up the sleeve of your coat. They make you look like a character from a Dickens novel. They can be very stylish. I could send them to you through Pablo.