I Love Dick by Chris Kraus Page B

December. She worried a bit about running into her ex-boyfriend Marshall Blonsky at Joseph Kosuth’s birthday party two weeks from Saturday, though really she was looking forward to it. “My first party in New York where I don’t give a shit,” she confided to Dick. “I’m looking forward to the future so long as you are in it.” Does this mean she was happy?
    Sylvère and Chris bumbled around the construction site that was their house “helping” Tad and Pam, non-Jews who mistook their constant screaming at each other for hostility. Maija, their apartment subletter in New York phoned to say she’d decided to stop paying rent.
    Both of them assumed Dick was out of town for the holidays. They were trying to figure out their next move. One afternoon Sylvère called his friend Marvin Dietrichson in LA to try and get a read on Dick’s reaction. And yes, before the Christmas break, Marvin’d run into Dick in the school hall and said: “I heard you saw Sylvère and Chris—How’d it go?” “I don’t know,” Marvin recalled Dick saying, “it was some strange scene.”
    Some strange scene . When Chris heard this her stomach contracted and she vomited. Was this really all it was? “Some strange scene?” Was there any way of reaching Dick beyond the filters of Sylvère and Marvin?
    Crohn’s Disease is a hereditary chronic inflammation of the small intestine. Like any chronic ailment its triggers can be physical, psychic or environmental. For Chris the trigger was despair, which she saw as very different from depression. Despair was being backed into a corner without a single move. Despair began with a contracting, swelling of the small intestine which in turn created an obstruction which in turn caused vomiting beyond bile. This obstruction was accompanied by abdominal pain so overwhelming she could only lie beneath it, waiting for the onset of high fevers, dehydration. The pain was like a roller coaster: once it reached a certain point she was strapped in for a ride which inevitably took her to the hospital for sedation, intravenous drugs and fluids.
    Sylvère’d become an expert at tricking the disease. All it took to stop the rollercoaster was to calm Chris down and make her sleep. Cups of tea with liquid opium, fluffy dogs and stories.
    That afternoon Sylvère brought Chris a pen and writing pad. “Here,” he said. “Let’s write to Dick.” This made her sicker. So then he stroked her hair and made some tea and told a story about their dead dog Lily, the one they’d loved who’d died a year ago of cancer, his words tracing a perimeter around a sadness so unspeakable and huge that they both cried.
    Chris fell asleep and Sylvère retreated back into “his” room, the master bedroom. Since arriving from Long Island they stayed in separate rooms for the first time in ten years. “A very democratic arrangement,” Sylvère noted resentfully. Chris had said something about needing privacy…the better to share her thoughts with Dick? But even with Chris occupying the northwest room with the sloping saltbox roof and tiny windows and Sylvère in the big east bedroom that overlooked the pond there were still four others empty. Room for the orphan, room for the pony trainer/caretaker, room for the nanny…an entire cast of characters who’d never quite arrived to share this Edwardian fantasy.
    Chris’ sickness was what had originally ensnared him twelve or thirteen years ago. Not the physical signs of it—dull hair, strange bruises, blue marks on her legs and thighs. He’d found these quite repulsive. “Usually the girls that I go out with are better dressed and better looking,” Bataille’d reported of his meetings with the philosopher Simone Weil. And truly, unlike Sylvère’s many other girlfriends, Chris’ body didn’t offer any