Fake House by Linh Dinh Read Free Book Online Page B

has a limited vocabulary, is a limited vocabulary. There are only so many things we can do to each other. Each touch must be warranted: an index finger on the lips, a head nestled between the breasts. When itcomes to physical contacts, to the dialogue between bodies, there is a hierarchy, absolute and vertical, corresponding to degrees of emotional intimacy. It is a gradation that must be sorted out and calibrated. I had never fallen in love with anyone before Tom.
    He was different. He was a cultured boy. At the museum he led me to Duchamp’s
Étant donnés
. He could talk about any painter with authority. He said, “Fuck Raphael!” He recommended Duccio, Giotto, Masaccio, Morandi. He explained to me, with great lucidity, the parallels between Chinese painting, late Monet, and early Guston. He said, “Thomas Eakins had a chiffon fetish.” He would rail against Jackson Pollock: “Yes, yes, yes, the artist pissing on the canvas.… What that guy represents, with his billboard canvases, repetition, and no content—unless you count acting out your adolescent sexual angst over and over, in the most jejune fashion, piss, piss, piss, as content—is America at its worst: smugness and megalomania fig-leafing a homicidal castration complex! And all that posturing: the painter as a sensitive athlete … a bald James Dean in jeans and T-shirt.…”
    His looks?
    I never itemized his body. Never scrutinized it. I only had the most cursory awareness of his nose, his eyes, his shoulders, his forearms.… Physical attraction is a hindrance to love, I reasoned. One must get over it. Even in high school I’d become indignant whenever I heard a girl say, “That’s guy’s cute,” or, “He’s buff,” or, “Nice buns.”
    Girls who talked that way were all about looks, were all visual strategists, were schemers. They preened themselves endlessly, farded their faces, and came up with subtle and not so subtle ways to highlight their tits and ass in order to create the necessary effects to lure as many boys as possible. They wouldsay, “At the party I was standing by the onion dip surrounded by a herd of swains.” They spent hours regarding themselves in reflective surfaces, the hood of a car, the pupils of your eyes as they’re talking to you. Sexual display, always sexual display.
    But love is not about looks because, within intimacy, the loved one’s visual capital is quickly depleted, you can barely see him. If you’re still staring at each other, then you are not intimates, because to stare is to acknowledge strangeness, novelty, even freakishness. It is a cruel and distancing act, what men indulge in at go-go bars. When you are in a new city, you stare, but at home you do not stare. That’s why artists are the most alienated people, because they make a career out of staring. To become familiar, to become intimate, is to not see each other at all but to listen. The loved one is distilled to an instantly recognizable voice babbling endlessly.
    Love is a communion of the minds, I thought, because the mind is the creator and repository of meanings. Unlike the body, the mind retains its elasticity through aging. It becomes increasingly more attractive, more profound, as the body collapses from within. You must anticipate, even look forward to, your lover’s physical debasement, when there’s no seduction left. When there’s no bounce to his step, when he’s groveling on the floor. Every physical attribute is random, unstable, a mere decoy, and has nothing to do with who someone really is. To say, for example, “He’s five-ten, with chestnut hair, a hook nose,” is to say nothing.
Hideous, handsome, radiant, striking
are all meaningless adjectives. The skin is cosmetic, a coat of paint: peel it off, burn it, and what’s left is still the same person, and not just the same person but that person’s essence. That’s how you get to a person’s essence, you burn his skin off. Any idiot can be seduced by a healthy body