The Correspondence Artist (15 page)

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

I apologize for the thoroughly counterfeit and not even particularly convincing facsimile of Binh's non-existent artistic interventions into our correspondence. It's hard to know how to do this tastefully.

Simone de Beauvoir also struggled with how to write about, or not write about, Algren. She went on to depict their love affair in a novel,
The Mandarins
. According to what she wrote Algren about that process, she left out a few details but on the whole stayed pretty close to the truth. Then years later, in a nonfiction work called
Force of Circumstance
, she was quite explicit about some of the more sensitive things that had happened between them. That's when Algren pretty much lost it. He made some very angry statements to the press, which he evidently regretted later. Even very early on in their correspondence, Simone was already worrying about how to depict him – how much she could say, and how much she couldn't say. She was writing a book about her travels through the US, and she didn't know how to deal with narrating the events when she got to Chicago. She felt it would be somehow inappropriate to write about the initiation of their love affair, but it was difficult to talk about her experience of Chicago without somehow referencing Algren.
She wrote him, “Well, I have to find a way of saying the truth without saying it; that is exactly what is literature, after all: clever lies which secretly say the truth.”

So I hope you will forgive me if I tell you that after that catastrophe with the giant-screen projection of my supreme humiliation, Binh evidenced first a somewhat childish indifference, but in the aftermath, when he came to understand what it had cost me, he showed a tenderness that was unlike anything he'd ever expressed before.

I had told him once that I knew that our sexual relationship was precarious, and that due to his constitutional disability and my own instinct for self-preservation, we clearly wouldn't be falling in love anytime soon. But I said, “Who knows, sometimes I think we could fall in love when you're sixty, and I'm eighty-three.” That, I could imagine. So after he'd shrugged off the Potsdamer Platz fiasco, after I wept and fretted (unnecessarily, it turned out) about the potential personal and professional ramifications, after he finally held me sobbing in his arms and realized what I'd suffered, he wrote me a very beautiful message saying that who knew, when we were sixty and eighty-three, maybe indeed we'd be lovers, or ex-lovers, or dear friends, or collaborators, but we certainly couldn't be far from one another.

O
f course it didn't happen like that. The paramour has never seen me cry. Well, there was that one time when Djeli played the kora in bed and his heartbreakingly sensitive response to his own song prompted a small, subtle, sympathetic tear to roll down my cheek. But in general, I do my best to hold it together with the paramour, even on e-mail. That short “I'm irritated with you” message was about as emotive as I
ever got. But my lover did seem to feel for me for a minute there after the catastrophe.

You may be wondering if we've had any contact in recent days. In fact, not. I responded to that message about the shrink with something light and amiable, and nothing came back. As I said, not getting messages these days is something of a relief. I'm working on this manuscript fairly obsessively.

I did, however, take some time out today to go to see a play with Sandro. It was a company called Elevator Repair Service, and they were doing a very interesting adaptation of Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury
. We've seen this company before, and they're always quirky and inventive. Sandro's taste runs toward the avant-garde. I once wrote the paramour that in general, I liked my art “small and experimental.” My lover responded that “small and experimental” was good, but so was “big and experimental.” I think this was meant to imply that a fan-base in the hundreds of thousands or even millions didn't mean that the paramour was not experimenting. In fact this is true. But I've already mentioned my lover's fascination with popular culture – that business about Cameron Diaz, for example. I myself don't find fame for the sake of fame quite so captivating.

Anyway, we very much enjoyed
The Sound and the Fury
. It focused on the section of the novel narrated by Benjy, the “idiot” Compson son, so of course it was disjunctive, non-linear, and sometimes confusing. In this production, each character was represented by a couple of different actors, often of contrasting race and gender. That opened up some interesting interpretive possibilities, and shifted around the political implications. There was also some highly stylized and comical choreography. The woman who played Benjy for most of the production was a wiry, child-like, bird-faced actress. I also saw her play Jack Kerouac (excellent).

Naturally, seeing this play made me want to come home and take another look at Faulkner. I'd also been thinking about
Faulkner because of Simone de Beauvoir's letters to Nelson Algren. You may be aware that Sartre wrote a very famous essay on Faulkner arguing that
The Sound and the Fury
manifested many of the tenets of existentialism. But in their correspondence, Simone de Beauvoir is constantly assuring Algren that he is a superior novelist to virtually all of his compatriots, including Faulkner. This makes you wonder if her opinion wasn't influenced by the fact that Algren was good in bed. She does, at one point, say that she and Sartre are going to publish a piece by Faulkner in
Les Temps modernes
. She says, “It is good since he has the Nobel Prize.” As you know, Tzipi Honigman also won the Nobel Prize. Simone de Beauvoir won the Prix Goncourt for
The Mandarins
. Relative to Faulkner, Nelson Algren was the kind of person Carlo would classify as a “loser.”

 

 

 

“Clearly, for Faulkner, writing is a kind of doubling in which the author's self is reconstituted within the realm of language as the Other, a narcissistic mirroring of the self to which the author's reaction is at once a fascinated self-love and an equally fascinated self-hatred.” – John T. Irwin, in the Norton Critical Edition of
The Sound and the Fury