The Correspondence Artist (12 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

That was when Djeli responded with that second “I love you but I'm not in love with you” message, the one I said sounded like it was written to himself. It was really unpleasant. And I accused him of playing fort/da. If he didn't take this up with his analyst, he should have. You know, even his mother made that comment about his “distance” in that documentary.

 

 

 

I mention these messages for a couple of reasons: because of the mosquitoes, but also because of this business of a letter which one seems to be writing to someone else, but is really writing to oneself. We all do this, of course. And yet we persist in imagining that a correspondence is a direct communication between two people. And we persist in believing in the singular reality of any given message.

Lacan made some interesting grammatical observations regarding this delusion. He said that in French, you could only speak of a letter – in any sense of the word – with an article attached to it, be it definite or indefinite. For example, he said that you could take something “to the letter” (
à la lettre
), you could receive “a letter” (
une lettre
) at the post office, or you could be a “man of letters” (
avoir des lettres
), but you couldn't say that there was “some letter” (
de la lettre
) anyplace, even if you were referring to lost mail. You would have to refer to
a
lost letter, or
the
lost letter. He explained this in relation to the function of the letter as a signifier. He said that any signifier was the symbol of the absence of the signified – and for this reason had to be unique. “Which is why we cannot say of the purloined letter
that, like other objects, it must be
or
not be in a particular place but that unlike them it will be
and
not be where it is, wherever it goes…”

Am I losing you? Think about it this way: even though I “received” the irritating “I love you but I'm not in love with you” message (the banal understanding of “a letter always arrives at its destination”), it's still pretty unclear who was writing what to whom, and who was in any condition to read it when it got there (where?). And as for that message that got caught in my spam filter – it was
and
it was not where it was, wherever it went… Even when it got permanently obliterated by my server.

 

 

 

My writing was interrupted yet again by an incoming message from the paramour. Actually two. There was one relatively chatty one, anecdotal, nothing too significant, which ended with “a kiss” of indeterminate temperature. Since this message was not hot enough to stoke the flames of desire for the romance, it provoked a slightly impertinent response from me. You might even say rude. But funny. I think the tone was disconcerting. I got another short message almost immediately that ended, “Now I go to the shrink.” Of course, my lover's sessions with the analyst are regular, but I couldn't help feeling like maybe I'd provoked some discomfort. This felt both bad and good.

 

 

 

The paramour doesn't like to feel out of control. Take, for example, the little exchange Djeli and I had once about oral sex:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I told you, despite the fact that he's in analysis, Djeli had at one point resorted to national stereotypes to explain our differences of opinion about fellatio. He had no resistance to cunnilingus, as you will perhaps have understood from the reference to the location-specific “kisses” he'd sent in the closing of his e-mail to me. I've already disclosed myself as wielding Freud with
a pretty heavy hand, so you can take it with a grain of salt when I suggest that Djeli's distaste for “fellation” has anything to do with a fear of losing control in love.

More interesting, perhaps, was that question of reflexivity. Djeli was very interested in hearing about my auto-erotic life. And as you can see, I was never disinclined to talk about it.

 

 

 

We were planning a visit. It had been a while. It was a relatively relaxed period in Djeli's schedule, for once, and he wanted to spend a little time in Bamako hanging out with me and visiting with the kids. Mariam had been surprisingly mellow recently. We were hoping we could have an uneventful week at this nice hotel called Le Djenné. Djeli had booked us adjoining rooms. We thought he could spend the afternoons with Issa and Farka at Mariam's house while I got some writing done, and then we'd have the evenings to spend together.

When I booked my flight, I decided that instead of hanging out at CDG for a long layover, I'd spend one night at a hotel in Paris. It would break up the trip and I'd arrive in Bamako less fried. On the RER into the city, I checked my BlackBerry. You already know what was on it. Nothing from Djeli. I dropped my stuff off at the hotel, met my old friend Susannah for dinner, texted Sandro before I went to sleep, and woke up feeling relatively refreshed for my flight to Bamako.

When I checked in at Le Djenné, the receptionist told me that M. Kouyaté hadn't yet checked into his room but that it was the one next door to mine. That was okay – I wanted to freshen up anyway. I didn't text him right away. I figured he was with the kids and I wanted to respect his time with them. I took a long lukewarm shower and rubbed some lotion into my skin. I was hungry but I figured I'd wait for Djeli so we could get some dinner together. I got dressed.

By 8:30 I was getting really famished. I'd been distractedly reading
Petals of Blood
but I kept stopping to check the BlackBerry. I was starting to get a little pissed off. I told the receptionist to tell Djeli when he got in that I'd gone out to get something to eat. Things were just starting to warm up in the neighborhood. Nightlife in Bamako gets going on the late side. I wandered over to the Bar Bla Bla, which looked like one of the livelier spots in the
quartier
. There was a motley assortment of Rastas and Peace Corps types. I figured I wouldn't stand out, particularly. I took a table in the corner and ordered the capitaine brochettes with a Coke.

There was a couple making out near the bathroom. He had her pressed up against the wall and their kisses looked very sweet. She was fat and pretty, and he was very skinny. She smiled a lot between their kisses. Djeli and I never kiss in public.

My fish was very good.

When I got back to the hotel, Djeli still hadn't appeared. I tried to read some more, and when that didn't work, I tried pretending to be trying to sleep. Then I got up, stripped down to my black lace panties, and posed in several provocative positions for myself in the full-length mirror. I looked pretty good.

Then I tried to read some more.

I finally gave in at 1 a.m. and texted Djeli the following message :
“donne-moi un signe de vie
.” I checked the BlackBerry fairly obsessively for the next hour, then cried for about five minutes, brushed my teeth, washed off my make-up, put on some moisturizer, turned out the light, and got in bed. I have some vague recollection of irritably swatting at a mosquito buzzing around my ear shortly before I drifted off.

 

 

 

Djeli, meanwhile, was snoozing in a first class seat on an airplane flying toward Charles de Gaulle International Airport. Issa
and Farka were by his side, out cold. Mariam had thought he was overreacting, but as he had written me (though I hadn't read it), he just thought it would be better to have them in Paris until the outbreak was under control. And as he'd also written me, even if he couldn't be stroking my pussy on his bed at Le Djenné as we'd planned, he'd be in Paris before I knew it. He'd already asked Ama to make up the guestroom for me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
his was so typical of Tzipi. I guess I started it. I'd sent her three little webcam photos of me masturbating while reading an e-mail she'd sent. They didn't show my head. Whenever I send dirty pictures to the paramour, I always leave them headless. It just seems like a good idea, considering how digital information travels. So these pictures were low-resolution, at an awkward angle, entirely home-made – and for this reason very sexy, if I say so myself. Tzipi didn't say anything about them. She
just sent some kind of political tirade, which is sometimes what she does when she's aroused. I knew that's what was going on. So I wrote her, “I'm not even going to ask you what you thought of my pictures. I'm going to take that politically incorrect subject heading of yours as an indication of your arousal, because that's the way you are.” She wrote back saying that my pictures made her very aroused. And that she wanted to talk with me about masturbation.

All of this was just a week and a half before we'd be seeing each other again. I asked her if she wanted to have this conversation when we saw each other, or if she wanted to have it on the internet, which was, as far as I could tell, created precisely for this kind of thing. We started having the conversation in our correspondence. I reminded her of an e-mail I'd once sent her about coming with my two fingers inside myself, imagining what she'd be feeling if my fingers were her fingers. She wrote back that she remembered that e-mail very well, and she loved it, and she had a question for me, but that she'd really rather talk about it than write about it. But she said, “Just to make the conversation seem finished: it's about the clitoris and the vagina.”

And I kind of sort of changed the subject to the Polish theater company. Of course the conversation wasn't finished at all.

Tzipi wrote again, telling me a beautiful story about standing and looking at herself in the mirror when she was a little girl, and being aroused by her own tiny breasts and long hair, and imagining a little penis rising between her legs. This image reminded me of those magical drawings by Henry Darger, of little warrior girls with penises. I sent her a couple of photographs of these drawings. She seemed to like them. And then she made those interesting comments about reflexivity, and reflexive verbs in Romance languages, and masturbation. Of course, it wasn't “fellation” she shrugged off, but the “estimulation” of the G-spot, an anatomical invention she found highly suspect. I thought maybe this was a generational difference. I can tell you, with her two fingers inside of me, I know she's touched mine. She's willing
to acknowledge that breasts are sensitive, that lips are sensitive, that all kinds of touch can be sensual, but she insists that female orgasm is almost inevitably linked to clitoral stimulation. Sometimes she'll go after mine – or her own – with a concentration bordering on hostility. Sometimes I'll grab her fingers and look into her eyes, and guide her to touch me with more delicacy. But the truth is, my erotic bond with Tzipi is so strong, even though we seem to disagree about some things in bed, I always come with her, immediately and repeatedly, and I always want more. Every time I'm near her I want to be touching her.