“My tears did not stop him, so I sat and watched him dress for the night ahead.”
Some of my favorite scenes in Just Kids are conversations between Patti and Robert ending with Robert gasping, “Patti, no!” in mock horror. It’s a charming glimpse of the gently contrary nature of the two.
But when Robert becomes increasingly involved in the world of hustling while maintaining an intimate relationship with Patti, I too said aloud, “Patti, no!” Admittedly, part of my reaction stems from a post-AIDS purview, but part is a struggle to empathize and understand Patti’s actions. In a relationship as deep and devoted as Patti and Robert’s, it is hard for myself as a reader to permit the entry of anyone else—especially anonymous anyone elses—even for the grand sake of art. I’ve grown to love their love story and, like both of them, am loath to let it go.
“My armor still had its vulnerable points, and Robert, my knight, had pierced a few, though without desiring to do so.”
The departure from the Chelsea Hotel—even just across the street—marks a major shift in Patti and Robert’s relationship. They now share the same living space separately and Robert’s hustling crosses a line when he sleeps with a man sans financial transaction. Still, he assures Patti, “there will always be us.” Shortly thereafter, Patti learns of Robert’s affair with David.
When she writes “Truthfully, I was involved in so many things that the question of Robert’s sexual persuasion was not my immediate concern,” it is one of the few times I questioned Patti’s otherwise—sometimes painful—honesty. Is the “truthfully” meant to convince the reader or the author? A clue, it seems, comes in Robert’s most unintentionally hurtful lines of the book: “Patti, none of this has anything to do with you.” Robert, no…
Robert’s concurrent sexual and social shifts obviously challenge the dynamic of his relationship with Patti. While a new haircut and forays into theater, poetry, and music still leave Patti’s “coarseness” intact, Robert constantly experiments and aligns his image with the Warhol crowd and New York art scene. Patti admits to feeling like an outsider in Robert’s social pursuits and it pains her a bit to see Robert selling his art to strangers. Members of the art world and patrons—strangers—now enter and hold a claim in their once private, shared sphere.
In leaving behind the idyllically bohemian world of the Chelsea Hotel—Patti’s “sacrifice” for Robert—their relationship alters fundamentally. As the romance crumbles Patti assures the reader true love endures. And while I may never be able to empathize with her patient, even loving, acceptance of a broken heart, I respect and admire her hopeful warmth towards an altered relationship with Robert:
“We needed time to figure out what all of this meant, how we were going to come to terms and redefine what our love was called. I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth.”
I feel a very similar struggle with Patti’s relationship with Robert. He’s this Christ-like figure to her constantly glimpsing a microsecond’s worth of art and trying to create the perfection he saw. I can see why she’s fascinated with that. His artistic visions were skewed but beautiful. I bet watching him create was one of the most amazing things in the world but there’s rarely a line drawn. She idolizes him. She loves him in a way I don’t think she could have claimed to love herself. Everything he says and does is for some greater good, whether for a God he’s struggling with or the art he’s passionate about.
I’m not too far in the book as of now, but I’ve seen the genesis of this relationship and feel like she’s handling him in a unique way, somehow different than how she handles everything else. She’s careful with him, she thinks through his actions and decisions, she wonders about him without questioning him. Whereas her surroundings concern her less and less and her ability to find (if not necessarily maintain) a job keeps her in a less-than-comfortable but not uninhabitable realm. From where I’m at, she hasn’t picked a medium. She’s steadfast in belief and she has belief in him.
We brought up loyalty in class today. How you can’t find her brand of loyalty easily, how many of us would shy away from her ourselves because we’d be too exhausted to handle her whimsy. Robert could. Or at least he tried. It was that attempt to take her on and keep coming back that spurred that curious loyalty that has us all stunned and dazed and lost. The more I think about it, the more I think I’m justified in finding it to be a symbiotic and unhealthy relationship but the more I think I can admire the earnestness of it. Their relationship is based on art, on creating, regenerating, reworking, finishing, and starting over. They mimic these aspects with each other almost as if they’re each other’s masterpiece. That’s something I am finding to be amazing.