Read Online I Love Dick by Chris Kraus - Free Book Online Page A

for pushing her to play the fool. But thanks to Dick, Sylvère and Chris have spent the four most intense days of their lives together. Sylvère wonders if the only way that he can feel close to her is when someone else is threatening to tear them apart.
    The telephone rings. Chris jumps a mile. But it wasn’t Dick, only the Dart Canyon Storage Man worrying because they’d left the locks to their storage bin open.
    Should Chris call Dick? Should she rehearse it? After all, the last time she’d been taken by surprise. A single idea drifts across her mind, based on something she’d heard from Marvin Dietrichson the day before. Dick was struggling to finish writing some grant proposals for his Department before the Christmas break. That was a possible “in.” Did Dick know Chris had once been a professional grantwriter? That she could whip out a proposal faster than Dick could whip it out? Should she offer to help, in compensation for all this trouble? But where would they meet? In his office? In his house? In the Antelope Valley bar?
    Dear Sylvère,
    There has to be something to look forward to, otherwise I just can’t go on living.
    Love,
Chris
    Dear Chris,
    From now on we’ll have Dick’s memory to cherish in everything we do. All through your trip across America we’ll exchange faxes about him. He’ll be our bridge between the Café Flores and the Texas oilfields…

    Wednesday, December 14, 1994
    Sylvère looked sad and tired when Chris left him with his overcoat and bags at the Palm Springs Airport. He’d fly to LAX, then JFK, then Paris while Chris finished packing up the house in Crestline. Chris stopped and bought The Best of the Ramones CD. When she got back to the house around lunchtime there were no messages from Dick but Sylvère had left one changing planes. “Hi Sweetie, I’m just calling to say goodbye again. We had a wonderful time together, it just keeps getting better and better.”
    His message touched her. But later that day, talking to her neighbor’s kids, she was shocked to learn that Lori and her family were certain Sylvère was her father. Was it that obvious, even to the most casual observer, they were no longer having sex? Or did it mean that Lori, a confident assertive Black woman from LA, couldn’t fathom someone her and Chris’ age hooking up with an old wreck? Lori’s younger boyfriend was handsome, silent, mean; he was a kind of ghetto-Dick.
    â€œDear Dick,” Chris typed into her Toshiba laptop, “This morning the sun was coming up over the mountains as I drove Sylvère to the airport. It was another glorious California day and I thought about how different it is here from New York. A land of golden opportunity, freedom and the leisure to do—what? Become a serial killer, a Buddhist, swing, write letters to you?
    December 15, 1994
    Sylvère gets off the plane in Paris, France. Seven thousand miles and 15 hours later he’s lost the drift of what it was in California that made writing love letters to his colleague seem like a good idea. He’s experiencing Virillian free-fall. His plastic hip is killing him. He carries Percoset and Darvon, searching everyday for the magic mix that’ll cut the pain without completely numbing him. Sylvère limps from his mother’s tenement apartment near the Bourse across the right bank to Bastille. Of course he hasn’t slept. At noon, it’s dark and freezing. He feels like an ancient animal. His first meeting is with Isabelle, an old acquaintance, sometime-lover from New York who’s acquired an important work of dubious provenance by Antonin Artaud. Nominally, Isabelle’s an independent film producer, though in reality she’s an ex-cokehead on a trustfund now in four-day-a-week analysis. Sylvère had always thought of Isabelle as one of the wildest and most reckless girls. Therefore, he can’t wait to sound her on