NEWS: A. O. Scott looks back at Roman Polanski's meditation on evil.
LETTERS:
Dear Dr. Farb,
I am not brushing my teeth before bed anymore. Once a day is enough. I stopped flossing two years ago. I still masturbate, and I would not be entirely opposed to sleeping with someone else, but I wouldn’t want to kiss her. Now, my breath will disgust her upon awakening; pillow-talk will come to an abrupt close; her lips will be involved with my body instead of my mouth, and her eyes will not be present to persuade me to forget you.
My teeth, once a chalked mantelpiece of pride for you, have decayed some. You may recall how I used to boast about never having had a cavity – the triumph was meant for you alone. I regret to inform you that I had my first cavity sometime since our last appointment, but I am happy to announce that my second – let it be a spit in your face! – appeared last week.
I have taken up coffee and cigarettes since we last saw each other. The caffeine and nicotine stain your bleach yellow. One evening, I “accidentally” fell off my bicycle and chipped a central incisor. You would have felt obligated to repair it if I had contacted you. You should know that it remains damaged, three quarters of what it once was.
Teeth take too long to rot. Do they thin like hair? Time seems to have weakened mine, losing the hold of my gums. When I lose my teeth, not you but somebody else, will give me dentures – the same unknowing latex gloves that fill my cavities with acrylic resin. I call these gloves “Doctor” and they call me “Mister.” You are a cunt.
I would like to bite into an apple and find my front teeth stuck in its skin when I pull it away from my mouth. I want to lick my bare gums, and for my tongue to think, “teeth used to be here” and then for my gums to finish, “but now there is nothing.”
Tomorrow I will brush my teeth with razor blades. It’s pointless trying to stop me – by the time you receive this letter tomorrow will have been yesterday, or the day before. I would like to bleed and bleed and bleed. My speech should be forever afflicted, and my smile – once the envy of all who saw me – shall cause others to stare or look away. An amicable wanderer will ask me what happened, and I will tell our story. But the friendly passerby will be unable to understand a word of what my cut-up mouth tells him.
I was going to include some of my teeth in this envelope, your teeth, but I thought better of it. Instead, I’ve scraped a thin layer off my gums with a nail file for you to roll between your fingers, wondering what between my lips looks like.
Eternally,
Jack Nicholson
Sonnet: O City, City
To live between terms, to live where death
has his loud picture in the subway ride,
Being amid six million souls, their breath
An empty song suppressed on every side,
Where the sliding auto’s catastrophe
Is a gust past the curb, where numb and high
The office building rises to its tryranny,
Is our anguished diminution until we die.
Whence, if ever, shall come the actuality
Of a voice speaking the mind’s knowing,
The sunlight bright on the green windowshade,
And the self articulate, affectionate, and flowing,
Ease, warmth, light, the utter showing,
When in the white bed all things are made.
Delmore Schwartz
And so, for the first time in days, our hero managed to flee his musty apartment for the New York City night. He wanted to run up staircases, leap down fire escapes, fly through alleyways into the moist September chill; but his apartment was on the ground floor and the air was too heavy to cool his clammy brow. He jumped up and down, hoping to either ascend through the tar-like sky or break beneath the sodden street; but his shoes seemed to stick to the pavement slightly, constraining the movement to a play between heel and toe. He screamed, “I’m going bury you and kill you alive!” He even looked for a patch of dirt to dig a burial sight for the mouse, but everything beneath his feet was flat solid with smoothened tarmac.
He paused to ask himself why he was so hostile, and after the brief interlude from Wolf (1994), Jack Nicholson returned to a scene from Chinatown (1974).
From his jacket pocket, he pulled out the terminated honorary detective badge – the one he received for exposing his uncle’s child pornography ring – and he looked helplessly at it. In the pocket, he exchanged the badge for an old stopwatch, which he set before placing it under Ironside’s tire.
I’d like to return to a time before Cagney and Bogart.
