Yeah, I'm still reading Love Is Colder Than Death. I'm a very slow reader actually.
pp. 119-120:
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[Kurt Raab] would clean up, but that was only one of his jobs [at Fassbinder's house]. With Rainer dead and buried, Kurt would recollect those days and speak to him "directly" in this voice:
So now I'm your private secretary. And if there's nothing to do, you'll think of something to keep me busy. The telephone rings. You don't answer anymore. That's beneath you. Mostly, you lie in bed, getting up only when it's dark.... I'm left to invent the excuses and the lies. I'm also your nurse. Not only do I have to cook, and serve you in bed, I must also look after you like a child, to make sure nothing bad happens to you. All night long you've taken cocaine and now it's four o'clock in the morning and you want to sleep. But you're too stimulated, so you have to take three Mandrax pills to calm you down. Then you remember you have to call Ingrid in Paris, to argue with her, so you take two more lines of coke and you're more awake than ever. More Mandrax. Suddenly the telephone receiver falls out of your hand and you collapse to the floor. My God, I think, now it's over. He's had a heart attack. I bend over you and listen to your chest. You're still breathing. You start to snore, so I drag you to bed and try to go to sleep myself. A little later, I find you in the bathroom sleeping very peacefully beside the toilet. I bring you back to bed again. You keep me going day and night.
Rainer's relationship with Armin was rapidly deteriorating, too, and both Kurt and Armin were finding themselves more and more frequently locked out of the apartment and searching for places to sleep, sometimes for a week at a time.
In March, Rainer shot his version of Clare Boothe's 1973 play The Women, which he called Women in New York. It was filmed in seven days just as he had staged it in Hamburg some months back, his final work in the theater. There were forty actresses and no men in the piece, and when released it was hailed as brilliant by some of his critics and as antiwomen by others.
During the staging of Women in New York in Hamburg, Irm had gotten pregnant. As she's said, she always used contraceptives with Rainer, and whether he knew it or not, whenever her period was late, he would fill up with childlike delight, says Irm, "thinking at last it's happened." Their sexual relationship, however, left much to be desired, at least as far as Irm was concerned, and copulation between them was sometimes unnatural, if Rainer's indiscreet confidences are to be believed: there had been vegetable and mineral phallic substitutes. So it was not surprising that when conception finally took place, Rainer was somewhere else.
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I mean huh? It's one of the only places the book declines to give details. 'Vegetable and mineral substitutes'? I can't tell whether the author is trying to render, like, basically dildos extremely exotic, or whether he's being vague about something actually really bizarre, out of some impulse towards politeness that doesn't seem to exist elsewhere in the book.
