The Correspondence Artist (5 page)

Binh liked my piece in
Wired
. In it, I'd described some of the recurring images in “zona fasciculata” – fleshy, yet abstract; sexual, yet oddly pristine – and I titled the article “Duong Van Binh's Heart on a Plate.” I was glad they let me do something kind of lyrical like that. It seemed appropriate. He sent me an e-mail when he read it. There was no text, just an embedded image, beautiful, innocent, saturated with color: a split beef heart on a piece of chipped china.

I was so touched he'd made this image, apparently, for me and me alone. Sandro was very impressed.

Binh was already getting to be a household word among the youthful YouTube cognoscenti, as well as some of the influential
curators and critics of my generation.
Interview
magazine asked me to fly out to Berlin to speak with him. He said he was glad it was going to be me.

You may be wondering how I can be flitting off on these international flights with such frequency, given that I'm a single mom. But keep in mind, I'm giving you various fictional versions of a single trip. Still, I must confess, I do leave Sandro home alone with a bit more ease and frequency than some parents might. The first time was that initial meeting with the paramour. Since then, I've done it two or three times a year. Sandro's been completely amenable to this plan. He's so mature. He's so tall. I realize that doesn't mean much. We have a doorman, we're friendly with our neighbors, and both Florence and Walter call and check in on him. I try not to leave him for more than a few days at a time. He eats take-out. I leave him detailed instructions regarding his homework and piano. So far so good.

I texted Sandro on my BlackBerry from the hotel room when I got to Berlin. I said, “Dude I can't believe this hotel room – the bed is on the ceiling.” They'd booked me into the Upside Down Room at the Propeller Island City Lodge. Maybe you've heard of this place. Binh had recommended it – it's run by his friend Lars Stroschen. Binh was about to release a CD of his video soundtracks on Lars' label, which puts out experimental sound discs. Lars basically runs his hotel to support the label, which obviously doesn't turn a big profit. Every room in Propeller Island has a theme. In my room, all the furniture was bolted to the ceiling. There were some foam pads you could sit or lie on under the floorboards, but there weren't many convenient places to put your stuff. It was a little disorienting.

Of course there are no televisions at Propeller Island. That was kind of a relief – no temptation to watch CNN or MTV. Depending on your perspective, I guess you could say I was lying above the ceiling staring at the floor when Binh texted me to say he was going to be a little late for our dinner date. That
was a good thing because I'd lost track of time and hadn't yet chosen my outfit. I changed my top a couple of times. When I looked at myself in the upside-down mirror, I thought I looked beautiful but it seemed strange that my hair wasn't flying upward toward the floor. When Binh texted to say “im in the lobby,” I climbed down the stairwell, running my hands against the wall. By the time I got down there things had righted themselves back to some semblance of reality.

Still, it was a shock to see him standing there, looking at me with such familiarity. He had a faint smile on his face. He was wearing a motorcycle jacket and he held a helmet in each hand. Before handing me mine, he told me I looked exactly as he'd imagined I would. That was an unusually self-possessed thing for someone his age to say to someone like me. Of course, Binh doesn't seem his age. He's one of those people that other people refer to as an “old soul.” We were standing very close to each other in the lobby and it was all strangely intimate. It was the first moment I actually articulated to myself that we might sleep together. You might have thought I'd have figured that out from the photo of the bloody heart. I think I was just afraid to want it.

He drove us on his scooter to a Vietnamese restaurant he likes called Monsieur Vuong. It's in the section they call Mitte. It was intensely crowded, but Binh is a regular there and the hostess helpfully ushered us to a corner table in the back. A few people seemed to be watching us as we moved through the crowd. I wondered how many of them realized this was Duong Van Binh. They might just have been looking because he's so astonishingly beautiful.

Binh is of medium height, with glossy black hair nearly as long as mine. His features are exquisitely delicate, almost feminine. His smile is radiant, easy, and entirely natural. I was surprised at how good his English was, as well as his German. He also speaks perfect French, but of course he ordered in Vietnamese. I asked him to order for me, since I don't know a lot
about Vietnamese food. He recommended the gói bo. I asked him if Tiger beer was any good and he laughed, saying I was welcome to try it if I liked but that he only ever drank Coca-Cola. On this point he was resolute. The waitress smiled knowingly. I just asked for mineral water.

I guess you know what happened next. There were his appreciative comments on my perceptions regarding his work, the uncanny resonance between our sensibilities, my awkward, spontaneous admission of admiration and of nerves – and in a flash, there was Aafke, coming undone.

After I'd dabbed the Coca-Cola out of my hair in the bathroom with damp paper towels, after Binh repeatedly tried to calm his ex-wife down on the cell phone and finally gave up, after she menacingly chased us back to Propeller Island on her scooter, after that confused scuffle on the sidewalk and my cowardly flight up the disorienting stairs, there I was: trying to pull myself back together from the counter-intuitive gravitational field of that uncomfortable foam pad above the ceiling, while a real bed hovered tantalizingly below me on the floor.

 

 

 

Here's that sestina I sent the paramour after the incident:

 

 

 

Recently I've been inundated with news of allegations that the Coca-Cola

Company has been sponsoring acts of unconscionable violence

Against union organizers at its bottling plants in Colombia. One photo

Shows Isidro Segundo Gil, a union officer, murdered at his workplace. I receive this information by e-mail,

As I'm on a list serve for those with an interest in labor politics. I've never seen

So many messages about a particular multinational case of alleged abuse: at last count, 42.

 

I'm sure I'm implicated, too.

Not that I've been sponsoring acts of murder, but I've been known to drink a Coca-Cola

On occasion. In fact, it occupies a conspicuous product placement in one scene

Of my life's cinematic version. A dramatic scene, with violins.

A desperate woman is tossing a glass of the stuff on my head, screaming, “If you call again, if you send another e-mail, I swear I'll kill you! I have a photo!”

 

I'm not sure exactly what she was going to do with that photo, Whom she thought she was going to send it to.

Actually, I doubt this photo exists. If it does, maybe she should put it in the mail

To the Colombian bottlers of Coca-Cola.

Wouldn't that just prove, we're all implicated in some kind of violence.

I'm not making excuses for them. I never intended to provoke this scene.

 

But don't we all play innocent sometimes? That scene

In the restaurant, the murder of Isidro Segundo Gil, some ostensibly platonic embrace captured in a telephoto

Lens outside a hotel in Neve Tzedek – these are not random acts of violence.

There's a horrible mathematical logic to them. The balance of power between two

Married people is as terrifying as the massive economic power of the Coca-Cola

“Family” of products. In some Romance languages, the word “Coca-Cola” is female

 

Although the CEO is quite distinctly male.

His smiling, goofball, gringo mug can also be seen

On the “
killercoke.org
” website, next to Isidro's. The Coca-Cola

Company probably never imagined this particular use of that photo.

The website says Isidro's children “understand too

Well why their homeland is known as ‘a country where union work is like carrying a tombstone on your back.'” Violence

 

Begets violence.

It spreads with the exponential virulence of a list serve. My e-mail

Is out of control. And in a dimly lit bar in Cebu City, or Abidjan, or Bucharest, two

People might be unknowingly on the verge of an ugly scene.

Nobody's there to capture it in a photo.

She's smiling and touching his arm. He's drinking rum and Coca-Cola.

 

Here in my city, in a trash can on Ludlow Street, I found a halfempty Coca-Cola and the remnants of an act of violence:

A stained photo, and a ripped-up piece of mail

With the words
no consigo vivir sin tu

 

 

 

In the three years of our romance, Binh only came once to see me here in New York. Even that trip wasn't
explicitly
about seeing me, but there were no other pressing professional obligations to bring him here that time, and it was in a period of relative demonstrativeness on his part in our correspondence. I
said relative. Of course, there were a few other times he had to pass through quickly for professional reasons – the opening at the Guggenheim (which was where he met Walter), his show at Barbara Gladstone – but these were fleeting and we hardly had a chance to relax. This trip I'm talking about was different. He said in an e-mail before his arrival that this visit would probably be “instructive” for both of us. I didn't ask him to elaborate.

I told Binh he was welcome to stay at our place, of course, which isn't huge – but we do have a little guest bed in an alcove that has a separate bathroom. He likes to sleep in his own bed. He's a physically affectionate person and he loves having sex, but he has a hard time sleeping and he likes to stay up late at night reading. The sound of another person breathing distracts him. He thanked me for the invitation but told me that his friend Naeem had offered him his empty loft in Tribeca. The place was enormous, and beautiful. I couldn't blame him for accepting.

The day he arrived, he texted me and asked me to come over. This was late May of last year. The weather was beautiful, and I walked down West Broadway. When I got there I took the freight elevator up. It opened directly into Naeem's loft. Binh was wearing turquoise silk pajamas. Everything else was white. It was an enormous open space with four columns and stripped wide-planked oak floors. There were a couple of sheep-skin rugs scattered on the floor, and a big white platform bed at a skewed angle near a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. They were partially opened, and gauzy white curtains billowed over them. It was like being in a cloud. Binh smiled and embraced me wordlessly. He pressed his hard-on up against my body and we began to kiss. He smelled faintly of patchouli. It's always like this when we see each other: we fall into each other's arms and within minutes we're fucking. It's only afterwards, when we've gotten that out of our systems, that we actually talk. That afternoon in the loft was pretty heavenly. He always gets very animated after sex. I'm the opposite. For some reason he wanted to tell me all about
Ozu and interior shots, something he'd been working out about the poetics of space, and it was fascinating but I was having a hard time responding coherently. I was still in a fog of sexual satisfaction. Fortunately he didn't seem to notice. And then he sat up and said, “By the way, do you want to have dinner with my friend Matt and his wife? I forgot to tell you, they asked if we wanted to stop by around seven.” It was already six.

It was all right with me. I showered off in Naeem's austere black slate bathroom and climbed back into the slinky orange dress I'd worn. I had a little ziplock bag of edible flowers in my purse. I'd grown them on my balcony, and I brought them thinking Binh might want to eat them in a salad. Now I thought this might be a good gift for this couple. I was intrigued that Binh was taking me to a dinner party, apparently as his date. We hadn't really appeared out publicly together – certainly not as a couple. At this point, partly on account of some media speculation regarding a few famously gorgeous women Binh had been spotted with, there tended to be photographers at his official appearances. This was just dinner with friends, but even in these more intimate contexts, we'd tried to avoid attention. It was partly because of Aafke, of course. I think we both knew some people might consider it a little inappropriate, our being together, but our discretion wasn't about that. I am pretty sure that both of us would adamantly defend the right of any woman or man to find a personal or erotic connection with whomever she or he might choose. But though we were lovers, we rigorously avoided being a “couple.” As I said, when it started to feel like we were one, we both had a tendency to recoil.