The Correspondence Artist

by Barbara Browning

  I am happy. Sandro is so beautiful these days. I worry because he’s working so hard. They have him learning violin right now, probably changing to bass later. Math is very hard for him. The girls are all over him. There are six that take him out every day after school and buy him cakes and sweets. It’s a good thing he’s congenitally skinny, and it’s also a good thing he’s a lesbian like you or he would be getting unbearable.

  The only questions I asked you in my last e-mail were: 1. Have you read David Graeber? 2. Can you tell me the alternative address where it’s safe to send a package? I’m not asking again if you want fingerless gloves because I think you don’t but I am hard-headed and may make them for you anyway.

  xoxo

  Although Sandro went through that period of hanging out with a whole gaggle of girls who wanted to feed him, he ended up getting a particular girlfriend whom everybody referred to as “Janis Joplin.” They just broke up. She was a pretty tough customer. She was grumpy about several things, including Sandro’s support of Obama. She prefers Hillary. She told Sandro she thought Hillary had a better position on gay marriage than Obama. Joplin, like Sandro, claims to be a lesbian at heart. But she had very little patience for his poses. She told Sandro, “You hide behind your Mayakovsky.” By this, she apparently meant that he pretentiously trots out his list of avant-garde and left-wing enthusiasms, but fails to research the basic issues. Of course, she’s right, but it’s the kind of flaw a person could find either irritating or charming. Before they got in the fight, Sandro took this picture of himself kissing Joplin at National Pillow Fight Day in Union Square. I thought it was so beautiful, I sent it to Santutxo. I think he was also profoundly moved.

  Sunday, March 23, 2008, 10:51 a.m.

  Subject: Happy Easter

  My trip went very smoothly. I slept six hours, then watched a bad movie (Nanny Diaries with Scarlett Johansson) and listened to Joan Armatrading on the iPod. When I got home, the apartment was a mess, covered with little feathers: yesterday was National Pillow Fight Day and there was a big party in Union Square. A thousand people hitting each other over the head with pillows. Sandro went with Janis Joplin. I attach a photo.

  I love this picture, the two of them covered with feathers, and the cops behind them.

  I vacuumed the whole house, started washing the dishes, and Sandro came in. Gorgeous. He’d grown (I swear). He was so affectionate and sweet with me. He went out to get Chinese food and we ate it watching the Marx Brothers (Monkey Business). My brother came by around 10. He was arriving from the set of a gay porn film for which he’d been contracted to write the script. It sounded funny.

  We went out on the terrace so he could have a smoke. The moon was out, but it was obscured by some clouds that looked like the scales of fish.

  Sandro’s playing piano as I write, improvising. Last night I went to bed at midnight, to the sound of him playing. I fell asleep smiling. I woke up this morning with a hard-on, thinking of you. It was that normal morning kind of hard-on. In men we call this “morning wood.” Anyway, I missed our fucking, but then Sandro called me in for a little cuddle in his bed and I felt very happy. It’s sunny in New York. I think today I’m going to buy some seeds to plant on the terrace.

  Tomorrow we’re going to the Bowery Poetry Club to see Clement read from Mayakovsky’s poetry (there’s a new book out about him). Clement sent me a hilarious e-mail in response to the invitation to Sandro’s birthday:

  >Right now the Nigerian mosque on Myrtle Avenue is ululating in honour of the

  >Prophet’s (upon him be peace) birthday, and it has caused the normally restive folk

  >in these parts to become silent and meditative. I assume Sandro’s mustering will

  >have a totally dissimilar character.

  >Only those proverbially riotous equines could keep me from such an assembly. I

  >have only to find a monstrous and unacceptable gift.

  >Petrified,

  >CVJ

  >p.s. “Janis Joplin”?

  I wrote this message shortly after the last time we saw each other. And four days later, I wrote this one:

  Thursday, March 27, 2008, 8:31 a.m.

  Subject: Mayakovsky

  Monday night we went to that reading of poems by Mayakovsky. Clement read in Russian and English. He was dressed like a fop, completely charming. There were several other readers – some actors, and some academics. It was in a poetry bar on the Bowery, and they projected beautiful photographs of Mayakovsky on the wall the whole time. Sandro was captivated, of course, and asked for a book of Mayakovsky’s poems for his birthday.

  When they recited that line from “A Cloud in Trousers” – “Mama, tell my sisters, Ljuda and Olja…,” I remembered a poem I’d written when I was 21 in which I stole this line. I just found it. Will attach.

  Sandro’s playing piano so well it’s frightening. Today’s his birthday. 15, going on 70. I can’t explain it.

  Florence is great, back in town. We’re hanging out this afternoon.

  I need to start a new writing project I think, and maybe find a new lover. I’ll see my ex next week probably but that’s a little complicated.

  And you, little frog, are you feeling less tired? Did you call the yoga instructor?

  I did attach the poem. Here it is:

  But We Were Led to Believe that We Were Going Somewhere

  Yesterday we left for good. We climbed

  Into a great fish, and took our seats behind

  Its fat, red heart. Through the fish’s skin the sea

  Looked green. We watched the telephone poles skip by,

  And the wires stretch out like muscles along the air.

  We are trying to derive our emotions now from bare

  Cold places. I believe that you were right

  About our lot. We will always be too late

  For something – fumbling for our tickets, sick

  At heart, and getting stranded on some dock.

  Looking at each other. Feeling lost,

  And calling home. “Mama. Tell my sisters,

  Ljuda and Olja, that there’s no way out.”

  There’s no way out of here. You know that, don’t

  You? Damn it! We wanted so badly to arrive

  In time. Now look at us: caught in this grave

  And hostile, slanted light. “As for the future,

  It doesn’t belong to us either. I am sure

  That in a few decades we shall be cruelly labeled

  As products of the past millennium.” They told

  Us so. Oh, we really thought we were “someone.”

  We spent the whole night talking of things to come.

  I cried a little during the writing of this section, but I was crying for Marcos, because he was afraid of dying, and also because Sandro broke up with Joplin.

  It’s coming to the end and so I allowed myself a chronological glitch. Sometimes when I knit things, I like to leave in a mistake or two, because it seems to make the project more personal. In case you didn’t notice: I only taught the paramour the expression “morning wood” last March, which was after the purloined e-mail and the catastrophe, whichever version you choose.

  For the most part, I’ve stuck with the actual chronology. I suspended a little the timing of the climax to allow for maximum flexibility, but naturally I’ve changed and added all kinds of details. This is a work of fiction. That was the point.

  I’ve been composing in my head the cover letter I’ll send with this manuscript when I mail it to the paramour. I want to make it as tender as possible. I realize I’m probably driving a nail into the coffin of our love affair. Still, I would like to be my lover’s friend forever or something like that. I think that’s really the most optimistic version of the 60-83 scenario.

  Sunday, October 30, 2005, 11:17 p.m.

  Subject: bruised

  You said that your memory of the film was bruised, like a fragile membrane. Mine too. I think that’s the quality that moved me. It has everythi
ng to do with the tango. A kind of hyper-sensitivity that’s sexual and irritating at the same time. Frictive.

  He made Happy Together in 1997, just before the government changed in Hong Kong, and some people at the time said that it was an allegory of the postcolonial state. A sick and exhausted love that expresses itself sometimes through violence. And neither side wants to give it up. Which also has to do with tango. And Argentina. Tango also has a complicated history of men dancing together. I found all of this interesting – principally because there are a lot of films about tango but for me none of them explores the implications (political, sexual, aesthetic) of the dance with as much subtlety as this film about two Chinese men in Buenos Aires. But the thing that stayed with me, to tell the truth, was that sensation of a contusion that you talked about.

  I didn’t see In the Mood for Love, which everybody says is so interesting. I liked 2046 which came out this year. Chungking Express and the other one whose name I forgot are very sexy and rapturous but a little bit MTV, which I think might bother you. 2046 is also very stylized in the way it’s shot but there’s enough that’s complicated about the way he thinks about narrative time and obsessive love that it seems to merit all that excessive beauty. Also the beauty of the women. And Tony Leung, who is such a great movie star.

  Of course it’s hard for me to read this e-mail now and not reflect on my relationship with Binh. It would be dramatic and excessive to call this a “sick and exhausted love that expresses itself sometimes through violence.” Even though everything began with that scene of Coca-Cola and tumult, the truth is that Binh and I are both very gentle people. You may remember that I told Tzipi that my aggression was generally of the passive variety. I think you could say the same of Binh.

  But of course I also think about that postcolonial allegory. It’s not uncomplicated that I’m American and he’s Vietnamese. I thought about visiting him in Hanoi. I think I mentioned, I was reading some guidebooks as research. But I ended up feeling that trip would just be too hard for me. It’s that white liberal guilt.

  Once I told Binh that I thought maybe it was good that in certain respects – like gender – he held the privileged position, while in others – like nation – I did. I’m not sure who held the privilege in age.

  Last summer Binh flew down to Antarctica. Because there was no wireless or BlackBerry reception, we were out of contact for several days. He’d gone down there to collaborate with his friend DJ Spooky. Spooky was sampling the sound of the icebergs melting. Binh was going to help him shoot the digital images. Obviously, Spooky wanted to make a statement about global warming. In the YouTube teaser he made for this project before going down there, Spooky mentions that the Greeks made up the idea of Antarctica. They had formulated the idea of the Arctic from the constellation of Arktos (the bear), and figured there must be a corresponding ant-Arktos on the other end of the world. Spooky says, “They never actually went there, it was just a guess.”

  This is interesting because Simone wrote Algren that “on the moon” letter from the Arctic Circle, when she traveled to the north of Sweden with Jean Paul Sartre.

  Tuesday, August 2, 2005, 10:28 p.m.

  Subject: conceptual art

  Yesterday morning a guy stopped me on the street. He was young and handsome, with an afro. He said his name was Ben. He said that I was beautiful and he asked to take a picture with me. He gave his camera to a woman and asked her to take our picture. He embraced me as though I were his very close friend. He asked her to take another picture. He kissed me on the cheek with so much tenderness. In the picture, it’s going to look as though I were the great love of his life. He thanked me. I don’t know if he was crazy or if he was a conceptual artist. I liked it.

  You said you hate cell phones. Me too. I only use mine to communicate with Sandro, because he goes out a lot on his own. My mother gets furious with people who speak loudly on cell phones on the street. When she came to visit us, she would pass these people and say, not very discreetly, “Shut up.” I also don’t know if my mother is a little crazy or a conceptual artist.

  It’s hot here. Sandro and I are starting to count the days until we go to Paris.

  Look, this message was from very early in the correspondence. I picked it out because it says something about conceptual art. Although Binh is a conceptual artist, of course, the paramour is not somebody you would refer to in these terms. After I sent this e-mail, I was speaking to my friend Raul, who in fact is a conceptual artist, and I told him this same story of the guy with the camera on the street. I had found this a very touching encounter. But Raul informed me that this is the oldest trick in the book. Guys who do this, he explained, are generally pickpockets. They get you all close like this, and you’re busy smiling for the camera, and they reach into your bag and take your wallet. That was disappointing. The good news is, the guy didn’t actually get anything. None of my cash or cards was missing. I came out of the encounter entirely unscathed. And if Raul hadn’t told me I’d been had, I would have gone on thinking that that guy might have treasured that photograph of us together for years, and it would have looked like I was the love of his life.

  I wish he hadn’t told me.

  Speaking of the deceptive use of photography, this is the actual, uncropped photo from my early correspondence with Binh:

  That’s my hand, of course. I already told you that I’m the one who’s been sending digital images as attachments all this time. So it should really come as no surprise that I, not Binh, was the one to proffer my heart on a plate. Interpret that as you will – but it’s evident that there was again a bit of wishful thinking in attributing the gesture to my lover. Fiction affords the convenient possibility of switching things around. You could also ask yourself what it means that I insisted that Binh was an artist of genius, considering that I actually shot that uncanny still of my lazy eye with the antiquated little webcam. And I didn’t even show you the one I took of my vulva. It’s very poetic.

  The titles of Tzipi’s novels were also culled from my own unpublished manuscripts.

  Nelson Algren similarly careened between self-effacement and self-aggrandizement. Sometimes it’s hard to say whether it’s one thing he’s doing or the other. You could argue that he was the one who brought on his own obscurity at the end of his life. He certainly predicted it. They misspelled his name on his tombstone. But a few years before, he’d written that it didn’t really matter having your name attached to anything, as long as it was inscribed “on some cornerstone of a human heart.” He said, “On the heart it don’t matter how you spell it.”

  The picture of my heart on a plate may have been misleading, but it doesn’t really correspond to the photo with the con artist. The con artist doesn’t correspond to me, or Binh, and in many ways Binh doesn’t correspond to the paramour. Neither does Tzipi, or Santutxo, or Djeli. Simone de Beauvoir doesn’t correspond to my lover, and I don’t correspond to Simone, or Nelson Algren, or “the ugly woman.” The paramour doesn’t correspond to Zeppo Marx in Monkey Business, and I don’t correspond to Tony Curtis as the “body slave.” In fact, I don’t really correspond to this narrative voice. Or I do, but I don’t. There were many of us, or maybe we were just two. We were hardly elite Chinese intellectuals, or French ones – we just wanted to feel like we were for a little while, and it was romantic and it was sexy and I know I’m going to miss it. I mean I’ll miss the fiction, I’ll miss Tzipi and her cruelty and her hair, I’ll miss Binh’s strange images and his beautiful cock, and Djeli’s angelic voice, and Santutxo’s hypochondria. I’ll miss waking up every morning and running to the computer so I could be with them again. And I cried a little, again, writing the end.

  But your friends can always see this fiction for what it is from the outside, and they know that you could be happy again if you wanted to. This is almost exactly the way The Mandarins ends, but a little more “American” and less existentialist.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to: S. Calle (inspiration), H.
Mathews and M. Chaix (glass of wine and a Cuban); D. Levine (title); J. Taylor (notes); E. Obenauf and E. Obenauf (even more notes); A. Pellegrini, C. Smith, C. Swartz, A. Schnore, J. Lewis, J. Vaccaro, R. Enriquez, and V. DeConcini (encouragement); L. Oliveira (misgivings); E. Cowhig (maternal grace). Tzipi, sorry.

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