The Correspondence Artist (6 page)

Binh had forgotten the address but he knew his friend's phone number. He asked me to call from the taxi to get the house number. A woman with a slight accent picked up. Binh hadn't told me her name, so I somewhat awkwardly said, “Hello, this is Binh's friend – we're on our way over but we forgot the address.” She told us, and the cab pulled up. We rang the doorbell. Björk opened the door.

Binh, of course, had neglected to tell me we were having dinner with Matthew Barney and Björk. Julian Schnabel was also there. He was telling Matthew Barney a big, evidently funny story when we walked in. He paused when he saw Binh, and came running over to give him a bear hug. Björk was soon affectionately stroking his hair and telling him how well he looked. Binh and Matthew Barney exchanged some kind of special, complicated handshake. They all turned to me politely and smiled when Binh introduced me. I handed Björk the ziplock bag of slightly wilted flowers and said, “These are edible. If you want you can put them in a salad.” She was very nice. She ran over to Schnabel and said, “Julian, look, Vivian brought us edible flowers! Here, eat one!” They each took a little limp blossom and chewed on it. They both raised their eyebrows and smiled.

The dinner was very nice. Although he's soft-spoken and his English is a little stilted, Binh likes to tell long stories. Sometimes you wonder where they're going, but in the end there's usually an interesting, unexpected image or a fragment of poetry or something that makes them memorable. Everyone seemed fascinated. Then Björk started to tell an anecdote about her childhood in Iceland, but I noticed that Binh seemed to be spacing out. I think he was listening to the music playing in the background. It was the soundtrack of
Pierrot le fou
. Quite abruptly, he said to our hosts, “Well, thank you very much for this lovely dinner. I think Matt is tired and we should let you get some rest.” Schnabel looked surprised, but since Björk and Matthew Barney didn't seem to be objecting, he said he'd walk out with us. We embraced on the sidewalk and Schnabel hailed a cab. Binh walked me home.

Naturally, I've changed the identities of the generous, attractive celebrities at the dinner party. I'm sure Björk is also very nice, but I've never actually had dinner at her house. Why should it matter anyway that you'd recognize their names? Why should I have felt at all out of place that evening, or two days later when Binh and I were flipping through art magazines at Naeem's loft
and Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson suddenly buzzed up because they knew Binh was in town and couldn't resist popping by?

Binh stayed in New York for a week, and we saw each other every day, but slept apart. In addition to these purely social visits, he had a few informal meetings with curators and dealers. I tried not to appear overly expectant. He came by our place one afternoon and spent about an hour looking at strange animation sites on the internet with Sandro. Sandro asked him to tag a DVD with a Sharpie. They like each other. Sandro doesn't tell his friends his mother's sleeping with Duong Van Binh. I don't think it's because he thinks it would be unseemly because of our age difference. Sandro and his friends are very open-minded about these kinds of things. I think he just doesn't want to look like he's bragging. Also, I've asked him to be discreet.

I don't know how “instructive” that time of Binh's in New York was.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe I should explain a thing or two. The line about Ultra-Sensitive referred to the condoms Binh likes. I crocheted him a really lovely little condom pouch out of metallic yarn, that just exposes the top of the little square of plastic wrapping where it says “Ultra-Sensitive.” I showed him that and said, “Ultra-Sensitive – that's you.” He smiled and said, with his very subtle, slightly formal accent, “Not really.”

I'd rather not explain right now the line about Kate Moss. I don't have a lot of patience for that kind of thing.

Binh responded to my e-mail, as he sometimes does, with a .mov file. He'd edited it out of some clips of my eyelid that he'd shot while we were together. He did this one afternoon right in the middle of our sex. We'd been having sex, missionary style, which frankly is Binh's favorite, and of course my eyes were shut, but when I opened them I saw that he was looking into them very intently as he pumped up and down. He slowed down a little and said, “Has your right eyelid always been that way?” I asked him what he meant. He said that he'd noticed that my right eyelid was a little lazier than my left. It's funny because I'm vaguely aware of this, but it's not the kind of thing most people would notice. It's very subtle. It's nothing a doctor ever raised with me, or even my mother, for that matter. I asked Sandro later if he'd ever noticed this and he had no idea what I was talking about. The only other person who ever commented on this, sort of, was Florence, who told me when we met in college that she liked to watch my “slow blink.” She also liked to watch my lips when I pronounced words that began with the letter
b
. I love Florence.

Anyway, it's true, when I blink there's a very slight lag time between my left and right eyelids. I think it might become slightly exaggerated when I'm in or near a state of orgasm. This may have something to do with Binh's having noticed it. He's also extremely attentive. So right then, in the middle of this, he pulled over one of those somewhat antiquated little eyeball-shaped
webcams, and started shooting some very low-resolution, grainy shots of the motion of my slightly retarded right eyelid. We weren't laughing. It was very intimate. It was sexy. At some point later he also pointed that eyeball at my vulva and I think that material came out looking very abstract, and beautiful. But that's not what he sent me. Ultra-Sensitive as he is, Binh wanted to show me we were looking each other in the eye, naked, with all our touching peculiarities. That is, I think this is what he was showing me. This is a still from the .mov file:

I found it very poignant. I felt like no one had ever looked at me that closely.

A few weeks later, however, when he appeared, self-satisfied, on the cover of
Paper
magazine with Chloë Sevigny and Scarlett Johansson licking his stomach, the thought struck me that maybe he was just documenting my imperfection.

T
he paramour can, in fact, be pretty unfeeling sometimes. I can't say I wasn't forewarned. I don't just mean that sweetly formal “not really” to my offering of the title Ultra-Sensitive. The initial scene at the restaurant, that placid “what you're saying is extremely flattering to her” – that should have been a dead giveaway. Later, when an e-mail contained a reference to “that beautiful, dumb Thai girl with whom I've been screwing,” I had to pause to wonder if anybody were getting messages referring to me as the paramour's “intelligent but only reasonably attractive” American sex pal. Maybe this kind of comment about the Thai girl will make you question the paramour's supposedly excellent gender politics. Sometimes I think that myself, but I don't think it's reducible to machismo. After all, Tzipi says this kind of thing on a regular basis. The question of racial objectification also seems to be threatening to rear its ugly head. I wonder if it will at all complicate things if I tell you that the paramour is the griot superstar, the international dreadlocked dreamboat, the Mick Jagger of Mali, Djeli Kouyaté?

Of course being a “World Music” rock star doesn't inherently guarantee that he wouldn't be capable of racial or ethnic exoticization, just as Tzipi's being a woman doesn't inoculate her from sexism. Lest you think Santutxo's a saint, think again. Or more nearly: it's precisely because he kind of
is
a saint that he feels compelled on occasion to be this crass and selfish. What can you say about a babe-in-arms like Binh? He doesn't even realize what he's doing yet.

“And what about you?” you may be thinking. “What makes you think a Midwestern white woman jetting off to Bamako is immune to any of this either?” Don't think I haven't thought about this myself.

Rolling Stone
magazine sent me to do a story on Djeli's homecoming in March of 2005. Actually, he'd requested me. As you know, he'd written me a few months before to thank me for that profile in
The New Yorker
. I'd never met him, but I'd been following his career for some time. His 2004 release,
À Tierno
Bokar
, was one of the most politically trenchant and yet poetically sophisticated albums of recent memory. I don't mean just among “World” artists. You can see I keep putting scare quotes around the term, and I hope you'll understand that it has to do with the absurdity of the commercial bracketing of somebody as profoundly cosmopolitan as Djeli under a term which, despite its cosmic proportions, reads to the consumer as narrowly exotic. At this point, Djeli himself has had the conversation so many times he's bored with it. Anyway, the brilliance of
À Tierno Bokar
, both lyrically and musically, was so self-evident, a lot of music journalists who usually covered other genres picked up on it – rock, jazz, classical. We were all talking about it.

I tend to write about jazz, but because my background's in literature, when I do deal with vocal music and original lyrics I pay a lot of attention. His earlier albums were also layered and complex, but I couldn't think of another disc that had such a novelistic intricacy. I did a very detailed reading. He'd helpfully included his own cross-translations between Bambara, French, and English in the liner notes. Even these translations were tricky, attentive to his own assonance, punning, and percussive metrics. There was a little citation from Amadou Hampté Bâ about orature, and how “
les hommes de l'oralité
” were “
passionnément épris de beau langage et presque tous poètes
.” One may have one's doubts about all oral cultures being this rich, but Djeli, without question, is passionately in love with language. He's definitely a poet.