The Correspondence Artist Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1: COCA-COLA AND VIOLENCE

  CHAPTER 2: THE PURLOINED LETTER

  CHAPTER 3: ANIMAL CRACKERS

  CHAPTER 4: ON THE MOON

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  This book was printed and bound in Canada by Friesens Corporation. It uses vegetable-based ink on acid-free FSC certified paper.

  ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS STATEMENT

  Two Dollar Radio Movement LLC saved the following resources by printing the pages of this book on chlorine free paper made with 100% post-consumer waste.

  Calculations based on research by Environmental Defense and the Paper Task Force. Manufactured at Friesens Corporation

  For R. Miller

  “‘All characters in the following narrative are fictional, not real – but so are the characters of most of the people I know in real life, so this disclaimer doesn’t amount to much…’”

  —Slavoj Žižek, quoting a certain uncredited “Slovene author”

  In fact, certain explicit references are made to real public figures in the following narrative, but all actions and quotations attributed to them are entirely fictional, as is the rest of the story.

  CHAPTER 1: COCA-COLA AND VIOLENCE

  It isn’t easy to be the lover of a great artist – particularly if you harbor any ambition of being an artist yourself. I once jokingly wrote to the paramour, “I’m the Nelson Algren to your Simone de Beauvoir.”

  Perhaps you know the story of their love affair. Simone de Beauvoir went to Chicago for a speaking engagement, and Nelson Algren was the down-on-his-luck Midwestern novelist who showed her around town. They ended up having an affair and Algren suggested maybe she could move to Chicago to be with him. Of course she told him she couldn’t possibly give up her life in Paris with Sartre. But she did like to travel with Algren through foreign countries, and she enjoyed corresponding with him in her slightly flawed English. She found him appealing because he was so American, so unquestioningly leftist, and simultaneously very modest and yet hungry for life. She also liked their sex.

  This was very much the appeal I held for the paramour.

  I think I can honestly say that I am a woman of extreme moderation. Some people find this attractive. I am neither old nor young. I’m good-looking but not remarkably so. I’m a professional writer – which is to say I make a living as a freelance journalist, and I plug away half-seriously at my poems and, as you can see, the occasional work of fiction. I am a sensitive, intuitive critic, but my own voice has a certain Midwestern flatness about it. Perhaps you’ve already noticed that.

  I’d love to convince myself that my politics are radical, but I’m afraid a more cynical observer might label me a guilt-ridden white liberal. I’m aware of my complicity in the quagmire of global politics. In an attempt to make amends, I give a significant portion of my income to progressive charitable organizations. I sew most of my own clothes, or buy them second-hand. I’m fairly obsessive about recycling. You get the picture.

  I am a very dedicated friend and correspondent. Actually, that’s probably my real talent. I’m what you might call a correspondence artist.

  I’m also a single mother. Sandro is fifteen, and while his temperament mirrors mine in many ways, he’s more extreme: extremely tall, extremely thin, extremely beautiful, extremely left-wing, extremely pretentious. He’s an expressive, lyrical pianist, but he has a dry sense of humor. Our domestic rapport is, on the whole, very harmonious. This is probably why I’ve remained single all these years. Sandro’s father, Carlo, went back to Italy when Sandro was a baby. I had a series of lovers, some of them long-term, all of whom Carlo denigrated as “losers.” I said, “So Carlo, what about you?” He said, “I was the biggest loser of them all. Obviously, you need to feel superior.” It was hard not to concede this point to him.

  He didn’t know, however, about the paramour. It’s the only time in my life I’ve been involved with someone so far above my station in life. Actually, it’s the only time I’ve been involved with somebody solvent, let alone rich and famous. Obviously, these weren’t really qualities I was looking for in a lover. I’ve been very discreet about this, though it’s been going on for three years. I think it might be petering out. Since we live on different continents, our love affair has mostly been constituted by e-mail exchanges. At times, our obsession with this process has seemed entirely mutual. At other times the paramour seems to get distracted. My dedication has been unflagging. It’s partly fueled, I’m embarrassed to say, by the vain and yet stubborn belief that my overly informative and yet occasionally insightful missives might be feeding the creative process of a genius. I’m probably entirely mistaken. Sandro knows, of course, and he observes the relationship with wry detachment. This attitude helps me to remain detached as well. Sandro finds the whole thing mildly amusing, except when a pause in the correspondence makes me irritable.

  Saturday, March 29, 2008, 8:07 a.m.

  Subject: I’m irritated with you

  If it’s laziness, it doesn’t cost so much to write to say, “I’m busy/exhausted/taking care of my kids/screwing a lot/having a neurotic crisis – I’ll write you in a week.”

  If it’s that fort/da game (“I’m going to push her away so she won’t love me too much”) it’s megalomaniacal.

  I woke up thinking this way. Maybe it’s my hormones, but only partly.

  That was an unusually blunt message for me to send. I think it signaled the beginning of the end. Or maybe the end began well before that. It seems clear that if I’m going to tell this story, this is the moment at which I need to tell you how I came to meet the paramour. But for obvious reasons, this is a complicated proposition – in fact, more complicated than you might think. Fame contaminates things. There are people who stand to profit from the most trivial information about my lover, and other people who stand to lose. So let’s pretend it’s Tzipi Honigman, the beautiful 68-year-old Israeli novelist who’s just won the Nobel Prize.

  In December of 2004, I wrote a review for The Nation of what I consider to be her most deeply affecting novel, Embracing Anomalies. Of course, the Nobel followed the enormous critical success of her most recent book, Problems are Defiant like Unattractive Angels, and this may in fact be the superior work, but that earlier novel really changed the way I understood the power of figurative language. It was full of extended metaphors. It worked like a drug on me. By the end I didn’t know anymore what the difference was between narration and figuration. It was trippy (sometimes behind her back I call her affectionately Trippy Honigman), it was sensual – but because of the context there were political ramifications. Fighting against the overwhelming tide of political violence, poetry was like a persistent, muscled swimmer that would reach the shore. Yet amazingly, she was never sentimental.

  My review was appreciative, but more than that, it kind of took Tzipi’s ball and ran with it. It was probably overwritten. I was inspired, or maybe I was infected. Anyway, Tzipi read it, and she liked it. She sent me an e-mail thanking me. She said that sometimes as a writer you don’t really know what you’re doing, and it was very gratifying when someone else understood you better than you had understood yourself.

  When I found this e-mail in my inbox, I freaked out. You can imagine. I think I was her greatest fan. I think I still am. I called my friend Florence and read it out loud to her. The message was very long. Tzipi praised the brevity of my sentences, and apologized for her own, which she said had a tendency to snake around the page until they ended up swallowing their own tails. Another extended metaphor. She said she hoped we could talk more one day about writing. There was a strange and disco
ncerting line about another article of mine she thought she remembered reading which made an “antipathetic” comment about her. When I read this, my heart fell with a thunk – I knew what she was referring to, but I certainly hadn’t thought of it as a slight. In a review of another Israeli writer’s short story collection, I’d made passing reference to Tzipi’s stature in the late ’70s as a national icon with something of a “hippie” aesthetic. I didn’t consider this antipathetic. I like hippies. But Tzipi’s style has certainly accrued a lot of elegance since then.

  Florence didn’t think I needed to worry too much about Tzipi feeling slighted by that hippie comment. Her message was very warm. Florence said, “You know, I think Tzipi Honigman is the most beautiful woman in the world. She makes you think there’s nothing sexier than a woman in her 60s.” This is true.

  I wrote Tzipi back telling her how honored I was to receive her message, and I hastened to assure her that I’d been a devoted fan for many years. I explained that “hippie” indicated, for me, certain social values which I found myself missing more and more, particularly given the current political climate. I knew she’d agree with me about this. I said that the next time she came to New York, I’d love to cook her dinner. We exchanged one more round of brief messages in which she returned the invitation, should I find myself for any reason in Tel Aviv.

  Perhaps you can imagine what happened a few months later. Sometimes one’s life feels like a book that’s being written by somebody else. I got a freelance gig writing a short piece for a travel magazine: nightlife in the age of anxiety in the Israeli metropole. I’d be spending two nights in Jerusalem, and two in Tel Aviv. I sent Tzipi an e-mail and she wrote me back right away asking what hotel I’d be staying at. She suggested she pick me up on the evening of my first night there, and she’d take me to the famous restaurant Mul-Yam. The chef was a friend of hers. She said if I were going to be out prowling the clubs till dawn, I’d better get myself some sustenance in advance. I said I’d love that.

  After I checked into the hotel, I took a shower and set my clothes out on the bed. Everybody said Tel Aviv was very laid back, but this was supposed to be a really nice restaurant. I decided to wear jeans, but with a low-cut blouse and some very high-heeled ’40s-style platform shoes. I posed for myself in front of the full-length mirror. I changed my shirt a couple of times but ended up going back to my original choice. Tzipi had said she’d pick me up at 8, but at 7:45 she called to say she was going to be a little late. She was apologetic. It was something about her younger son – he wasn’t feeling well, and Tzipi had to wait for her ex to get there. She sounded a little flustered.

  When she got to the hotel around 9, they called me from the front desk and said I had a visitor. I walked down the steps and saw her standing expectantly in the lobby. Everybody in the place was looking at her. It’s not just that she’s so beautiful. She’s also extremely famous. People here know Tzipi’s face, but in Israel, it’s ubiquitous – plastered in the window of every bookstore, smiling enigmatically from street placards, flitting with eerie regularity across the television screen. She was exactly as I’d seen her in those photographs – just, perhaps, a little greyer. That famous white streak through her gorgeous, wild hair had spread out further, almost encompassing her face now in a snowy blur, but her eyes were still shiny and black, rimmed, as ever, with kohl. She held her arms out, and we embraced. It felt strangely natural. She had a very slight scent of vetiver. She said, “You look as I knew you’d look. This is exactly as I pictured you.”

  Everyone in the lobby smiled at us.

  In the car on the way to the restaurant, Tzipi apologized for being late. She explained that she was in the process of a somewhat complicated separation. It had been her decision, and her ex was having a difficult time. Tzipi didn’t want to make it any more difficult than it had to be for their son. I wasn’t sure how to respond to such immediate intimacy, but I told her I understood. She asked me if I had any children, and I told her yes, one.

  She changed the topic to my writing. She told me what she’d liked, particularly, about that review. I said that after I’d read Embracing Anomalies I’d felt compelled to write a series of prose poems. She laughed and said she always found this an interesting contradiction in terms, although people often used the expression to describe her more fragmented narratives. She asked me if I knew any of my poems by heart, and if I could recite one to her.

  With my heart in my mouth, I did – an unrhymed sonnet about failed love. It was called “Obscene.” She looked over at me, smiling just a little. I felt extremely naked.

  Everyone knew Tzipi at the restaurant. The famous chef, Yoram Nitzan, came out to speak with us. She told him to bring us whatever he thought was best. Nitzan grabbed her strong brown hand and kissed it. He turned to me and smiled. He said, “You know, we have the best wine list in Tel Aviv – we have our own label, excellent, but Tzipi is horrible, she insists on ruining my beautiful food by washing it down with Coca-Cola!”

  It’s true. Despite the fact that she is unarguably the most elegant woman in the world, Tzipi Honigman never touches wine. She drinks Coke, assiduously. She said, “There’s nothing like a Coca-Cola with a tender piece of foie gras! You don’t believe me, but you haven’t tried it. I can’t tolerate alcohol – it makes me feel desiccated. But I don’t prohibit others. Feel free to order wine if you like! Or whiskey!”

  I was nervous enough. I didn’t think I needed to be the only one impaired. I just asked for mineral water.

  The food was exquisite, but I had a hard time eating. At one point I looked up at Tzipi and said – and this was entirely unpremeditated – “I’m nervous.” I told her, truthfully, how much I admired her, what she’d meant to me, as a writer, as a reader, and for how long. She took this in gracefully, accepting it at face value. Surely she’d heard this many times before.

  What happened next was something of a blur. There was a commotion toward the front of the restaurant, and suddenly I was looking up at a tall, beautiful, distracted young woman in a black leather jacket. Her long brown hair was disheveled, her eyes streaked with ruined make-up. She was staring at me in disbelief. Tzipi looked up and said gently, “Hannah…”

  “You told me she was some middle-aged journalist! You said this was ‘professional’!”

  “I am…” I uttered meekly. “It is…” Tzipi said.

  “Tell me you don’t think she’s beautiful!” Hannah screamed. Tzipi stared back dumbly. “Tell me!”

  Tzipi said, “Hannah, what you’re saying is extremely flattering to her.” She didn’t seem to notice that this was pretty insulting, but I was a little too disoriented to take offense. Hannah looked at the table between us, littered with plates smeared with remnants of fatty liver and traces of sauce. She decisively grabbed Tzipi’s wine glass of Coke and dumped it on my head.

  Everyone, everything, froze. I felt a lump in my throat and worried for a second that I was going to cry. I’m not sure why – if it was just a childish reaction to the spoiling of my perfect dinner with Tzipi Honigman, or if I was in that instant intuiting just how inevitably sad overwhelming love always is. Then as quickly as she’d appeared, Hannah went striding out of the restaurant.

  The other diners tried very hard not to pay attention. The waiter quietly swept in with some extra napkins, cleared the plates before me and swabbed away the puddle of brown liquid. I dabbed at the top of my head with my napkin. Tzipi looked up at me and said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  I excused myself quickly and rinsed off a little in the ladies’ room. I surveyed the damage: surprisingly minor. But my heart was racing. When I got back to the table, the next course had arrived, but I was sure I couldn’t eat it. Tzipi explained a little, but I’d already figured it out, as I’m sure you have, too. Tzipi’s life with Hannah was something not much talked about in literary circles, though people knew. They’d always been discreet, even after Hannah conceived a child and Tzipi took to calling him, as well, her son.

>   Tzipi had been married briefly in the ’70s and she had an adult son, Asher, with whom she was very close. In fact, they were famously close – and I’d always identified with her because of that, because of my relationship with Sandro. Maybe it’s something of a cliché. Like Susan Sontag and her son. I simultaneously romanticize this model, and worry about its pathological implications. Anyway, the parallels were obvious.

  Hannah had been introduced to Tzipi as a young student. She was writing poetry and Tzipi took her under her wing. Hannah stopped writing almost immediately, and pretty soon she’d dedicated herself entirely to being with Tzipi. She moved in. A few years later she had Pitzi. I’ve seen a photograph of her pregnancy. She was so stunningly beautiful. Annie Leibovitz took a portrait of her, smiling beatifically over her perfect, soft breasts, the tendrils of her brown hair falling over her shoulders, her lovely, round belly circled by Tzipi’s unmistakably muscular and yet graceful, tanned arm. Tzipi was mostly out of the shot, obscured by Hannah’s naked glory, but you could see her pressing her face into the back of her lover’s neck.

  That was ten years ago. Hannah was 19. Tzipi was 58.

  Sunday, March 20, 2005, 10:29 a.m.

  Subject: my bad manners

  Tzipi, I felt so sad afterwards – for you, and for her. I hope from the bottom of my heart that things get better soon.

  I just wanted to tell you that despite the circumstances, it was an immense pleasure to meet you and talk a little.