Game of Unknowns

By Diane Mehta

“Growltiger was a Bravo Cat who lived upon a barge,” he snarled. I had asked G to memorize and record several lines by T.S. Eliot for his first assignment. I listened, entranced. We had met the previous night at Brazenhead, a secret bookstore on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a cozy warren of four rooms packed floor-to-ceiling with used books and stocked with every hue of liquor. G was Australian and an artist. We fell into a conversation about who was bossier.

“Give me your email,” I commanded, “we’ll see who’s bossier.” He obliged. I would give him a task, which he’d agree to do promptly, after which he would assign me a task, which I’d agree to do promptly, and so on. Along the way, we’d see who was bossier. We’d be treading a fine line between bossy and compliant, with the challenge of switching roles instantly. We had two rules: Each had to carry out the other’s command promptly and make a serious effort to do a good job.

We began exchanging emails several times a week. My first task was to secretly photograph people in their apartments. I walked around my neighborhood, pretending to be intrigued by design elements in front yards: stoops and iron railings, close-ups of stairs, details of fences. When homeowners stormed out, weaponized with accusations of snooping, I calmly asked after their window grills and beautifully woodworked doors. G was in my mind and we had a secret.

The game, with its expectation that you’d drop everything to produce for the other person, had an urgency that was thrilling. Emotionally, there was no question of disappointment because we had an arrangement. Back then the relationship seemed like a coy game, a diversion. But it would deepen and morph. An artistic exchange promised to be compelling. From the beginning, the correspondence was full of surprises.

In his 1925 book Essai sur le don (“The Gift”), the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss probed the meanings behind the cultural exchange of gifts in archaic societies. Because your identity is bound up with the object you give, Mauss said, the recipient is compelled to reciprocate.

In every relationship, you pay a kind of debt. From a practical point of view, G and I had a commitment to exchange goods. But the nature of what we each created for one another made a difference. “Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts,” Emerson said in his essay Gifts. It is only when you give something of yourself that you are truly giving, Emerson was suggesting. “Thou must bleed for me,” he urged. Giving was not a commodity but...