I Love Dick Read Free Page A

Reactive—like Charlotte Stant to Sylvère’s Maggie Verver, if we were living in the Henry James novel The Golden Bowl —the Dumb Cunt, a factory of emotions evoked by all the men. So the only thing that I can do is tell The Dumb Cunt’s Tale. But how?
    Sylvère thinks it’s nothing more than a perverse longing for rejection, the love I feel for you. But I disagree, at bottom I’m a very romantic girl. What touched me were all the windows of vulnerability in your house…so Spartan and self-conscious. The propped up Some Girls album cover, the dusky walls—how out of date and déclassé. But I’m a sucker for despair, for faltering—that moment when the act breaks down, ambition fails. I love it and feel guilty for perceiving it and then the warmest indescribable affection floods in to drown the guilt. For years I adored Shake Murphy in New Zealand for these reasons, a hopeless case. But you’re not exactly hopeless: you have a reputation, self-awareness and a job, and so it occurred to me that there might be something to be learned by both of us from playing out this romance in a mutually self-conscious way. Abstract romanticism?
    It’s weird, I never really wondered whether I’m ‘your type.’ (’Cause in the past, Empirical Romance, since I’m not pretty or maternal, I never am the type for Cowboy Guys.) But maybe action’s all that really matters now. What people do together overshadows Who They Are. If I can’t make you fall in love with me for who I am, maybe I can interest you with what I understand. So instead of wondering ‘Would he like me?’, I wonder ‘Is he game?’
    When you called on Sunday night, I was writing a description of your face. I couldn’t talk, and hung up on the bottom end of the romantic equation with beating heart and sweaty palms. It’s incredible to feel this way. For 10 years my life’s been organized around avoiding this painful elemental state. I wish that I could dabble like you do around romantic myths. But I can’t, because I always lose and already in the course of this three-day totally fictitious romance, I’ve started getting sick. And I wonder if there’ll ever be a possibility of reconciling youth and age, or the anorexic open wound I used to be with the money-hustling hag that I’ve become. We suicide ourselves for our own survival. Is there any hope of dipping back into the past and circling round it like you can in art?
    Sylvère, who’s typing this, says this letter lacks a point. What reaction am I looking for? He thinks this letter is too literary, too Baudrillardian. He says I’m squashing out all the trembly little things he found so touching. It’s not the Dumb Cunt Exegesis he expected. But Dick, I know that as you read this, you’ll know these things are true. You understand the game is real , or even better than, reality, and better than is what it’s all about. What sex is better than drugs, what art is better than sex? Better than means stepping out into complete intensity. Being in love with you, being ready to take this ride, made me feel 16, hunched up in a leather jacket in a corner with my friends. A timeless fucking image. It’s about not giving a fuck, or seeing all the consequences looming and doing something anyway. And I think you—I—keep looking for that and it’s thrilling when you find it in other people.
    Sylvère thinks he’s that kind of anarchist. But he’s not. I love you Dick.
    Chris
    But after finishing these, Chris and Sylvère both felt they could do better. That there were things still left to say. So they began a second round, spending most of Friday sitting on their living room floor in Crestline passing the laptop back and forth. And they each wrote a second letter, Sylvère about jealousy, Chris about the Ramones and the Kierkegaardian third remove. “Maybe