American Genius

by Lynne Tillman

  After a discussion in which righteousness of every stripe has been broadcast, during which, against my better judgment, I might voice my own, I might dejectedly return to my bedroom, whose bed has already been made by a housekeeper, who has also placed my nightgown on the pillow, folded just so, fluffed the three pillows to their fullest, screwed on the tops of plastic bottles, and stacked the books and drawing pads I threw by the side of my bed into a neat pile, and then, entering the room, which is now without some of my traces, I immediately lie on the neatened bed, with hospital corners that invariably and nauseatingly remind me of camp, the gray bunk, and the six other little faceless girls. Again my head is a mob of arguments, a clutter of loose phrases and ill-conceived ideas, so then my skin starts to burn, and I know that the small veins on my nose and chin have become irritated by the exchanges to which I was subjected and engaged in, to my regret. On some mornings, the residents’ table talk ropes me insidiously to my plain wooden chair, simply because I hope that something might happen that affects, in a positive direction, the course of the conversation so that I won’t leave it disgruntled, but this rarely happens, since the longer I stay the worse it is, and then I flee, feeling worse than I might have had I not hoped for something better. Hope is necessary, but it is the cause of many dilemmas, and sometimes my day is ruined, its promise assassinated, and then I wish I were in any other place, or alone, or with any other persons, especially the Polish woman, who is an efficacious stranger, whose deft strokes on my forehead might remove more than dead skin, though I know that isn’t likely. My organs won’t be healed of a mysterious ailment that thrives undetected, but the alleviation of worry, the elimination of dead skin from the body, has a placebo effect, the truth of which can disconcert some. Placebos often help as much as medicines, and to some it begs credulity that the mind can affect the course of an illness or cure the body of physical suffering, but it can, since the mind is part of the body, or the mind is also the body, and mental illness is also physical illness and vice versa. The actions the Polish woman performs on my face, or the massages she gives me, calm me, her indifferent strokes placate me, and sometimes I imagine her powerful hands and arms kneading away the impurities that threaten to overwhelm my system, and in its anonymity having a facial restores me to myself and contradictorily encourages a sense of dissolution into a larger humanity, since all have faces that could be steamed and cleaned, if they had the desire, inclination, or money, though even if they could afford it, some might not want a facial, thinking it wasteful and without redeeming value. I could defend a facial’s worth, were I forced, and if I were tortured, I would tell everything I knew.

  What I’ll never know is significant, but some of the people who could have given me answers are gone, and some who are here, to whom I speak or listen regularly, wouldn’t know, since what I want to know might not have definite answers, or I might not have the way or wherewithal, even the words, to form the necessary and appropriate questions. I’m a recorder and collector, a listmaker, I studied history, philosophy, literature, and have taught American history, but dissuaded from the academic life after receiving a Ph.D., or unsuited for its piquant rigors, even though well equipped to be an historian, since I could hear or read something and remember it, I subsequently trained as an object-maker and designer, while haphazardly pursuing odd jobs. I also wait, in the sense that a young man here, when asked what he did, responded, “I’m a waiter,” and, when asked, “But where do you work?” the young man said, ‘Tm just waiting.” I am waiting, not just for a letter or telephone call, but for that which has so far escaped me or might come unexpectedly, I can easily wait for mail to arrive, especially here, and waiting for it, even with the advent of cyber deliveries, can be a meaningful part of my day, as can waiting itself.

  Some time ago, months and months, I believe, though time is unimportant here, and seemingly grows more insignificant every day, when I hadn’t been expecting anything specific, but had the gnawing sense that something must happen to me soon, and should, even an accident, because otherwise life would be the same, and I seek change or create a situation that might effect it, a postcard arrived. It was typed on an old-fashioned typewriter and induced a blurry recognition, similar to confusion between a memory and a story about the past. Its signature looked scrambled or scribbled, even scratched, and I’d seen the handwriting before, I thought, or knew the hand, but also in this guise or context didn’t know how I knew it or from where or when. On the front, there was a jumbo jet plane flying in a blue sky and on its back the sender had typed: “Out of here, going here and there. But where? Where are you? Miss you.” Then the scratchy signature. The stamp was franked in Omaha. I was pleased it had arrived and spent an hour, more or less, on it. I don’t wear a watch, which bothers some of the residents here, who are concerned with time as I am, though less concerned than people in more ordinary or less-privileged situations, who suffer from the stress of regular schedules, but I was trying to figure out what the jet plane postcard portended. The beginning of worry sounded inside me during that hour, and my skin crawled, but then I worked to subdue myself by various methods, including a mug of herbal tea and slow, deep breathing. Some people’s skin crawls incessantly, they suffer from vermiculations, or the sensation of skin crawling, and there are also various neuralgias, or nerve irritations, in which the skin burns and is accompanied by inflammation, which is painful, since often it is inflammation, when white blood cells flood an area of the body, that causes distress and pain; peripheral neuritis is the sensation of damage to a peripheral limb, one that is gone, like an amputated leg, which still produces sensation, but it is in a way a feeling of loss, since the body, or the mind’s body, remembers what is no longer there. But soon I looked out at the field, where there were no deer but some small birds, and decided not to think further or badly about the postcard, not to imagine the worst, to assure myself it was harmless and probably nothing, since nothing had occurred, and it was probably meaningless. It might be an omen, which would be a kind of vanity, but better that than futility or meaninglessness, since at the least the postcard addressed to me meant someone was thinking of me in a curious, unusual manner, someone I wasn’t thinking of before, but would now, and so I was joined to him, or maybe her, and enmeshed in his travels, though he was distant and anonymous to me, but the intimacy was intriguing, it was intimate, it came close to me, when so little does or is intimate, yet everyone here talks about intimacy, which finally disgusts me, and I must go to bed. The postcard incited my imagination and had brought surprise to my routine and habit of mind, for which I was grateful, since I like surprise and abjure routine.

  I like to believe I enjoy surprises, that I’m someone to whom an eruption of the unusual should be usual, or who branches out to advance the implausible. I might fly a jet, become a man, walk backward without a care, threaten like a stalker, speak my mind freely at all times, swim the Atlantic on a greasy back, be silent for months like a Carthusian, have absolute faith, research the first humans and how they knew food from poison and learn their early, even fatal mistakes. The first people, Bushmen, ate raw food that must have carried inedible matter as well as microbes, but then there was the discovery of fire, and cooked meat and maybe grasses, but I might find out when bread made its first appearance and how; I once read a book about pizza, flat bread with cheese is ancient in origin. It is difficult to comprehend a world without the discoveries that are commonplace, but I’d like to. More, I’d like especially to research failure, the dustbin of human effort, upon which our world is also based. Sometimes images and sensational ideas come to me in torrents, but they may actually be worthless or insubstantial, or answers arrive to questions, or some thoughts arrive with remarkable clarity, but they may not be what I need, or they may be parts of wholes and not capable of conclusion, like a scientific experiment just before it’s completed. A friend had a stroke, and he could barely form words, his brain a frustration to him when it was ordinarily a boon, giving him ease in sp
eaking effortlessly and precisely, but he was now without words, and felt deficient, so his skin erupted in a red sea. He pointed to a wastepaper basket of basic design but ugly material, wanting me to toss trash into it, and said, with great effort, “Throw it into the waiting for forgetfulness.” His ability to read was never affected, and language returned to him, but his naming a wastepaper basket “waiting for forgetfulness” was, with his recovery, lost to him. He has lived in the same house for years, not far from where I first ate Indian food, which I instantly liked, whose spices and smells were new to me then, as was the man I first ate it with, whom I fell in love with for a short time, but Indian food is no longer new, though I still appreciate its tastes and smells, and that friend’s house is also near the beauty salon where I first had my legs waxed. The salon’s chairs mocked 18th-century French design, and its walls were flecked with gold, to invoke that other, supposedly golden era, one of abundance and elegance for a relatively few people, while its beauticians, in street clothes of varying, inconsistent style, provided ordinary care and treatment, haircuts and dye-jobs, as well as leg, arm, and lip waxes, sometimes roughly given, on the worn scarlet silk chairs, and a client such as myself, uncomfortable in this discordant atmosphere, could not relax.

  If the colors of the room were blue and green rather than gold and scarlet, I might have relaxed. They are soothing colors, but reds and yellows are exciting, it says in How to Sleep and Rest Better, a 1937 manual in the community’s small library, whose blue cover attests to its psychologist author’s belief that readers can free themselves from the day’s worries, with soothing colors, in order to succumb to a blissful unconsciousness. It is important, the manual claims, to calm down in the evening, to prepare for sleep as you would for any other activity, to slow down thinking, forget serious or exciting things, to make the mind blank. The moron, the author says, does not have to make his mind a blank before going to bed since it is blank day and night. Mental patients are given hot baths and hydrotherapy to calm them, but the manual says people should have sufficient control to calm down at will, they should be superior to their environment, but anyway color schemes should be carefully administered, the author says. To relax the body for sleep, the poor sleeper must develop a different mental attitude, to regard sleep as a peaceful sanctuary, when a person sets aside all worries, resentments, and fears, and learns to relax, but a person must be relaxed about learning itself, otherwise the body will become a taut, keyed-up machine. There is something called “progressive relaxation” in which with each successive minute the sleeper relaxes more. Truly beautiful women, the author says, know the secrets of relaxation and beauty naps. I am waiting for forgetfulness.

  For years, I shaved my legs, then decided to have them waxed, and now there is barely any hair on them. The woman who first ripped hair from my legs was born in Mexico, and appeared, when I met her, healthy and without problems, while she served me in a spacious salon, where I, along with other women, was catered to adequately and sometimes courteously or lavishly. Every two months I visited the salon, until one day the Mexican woman, whose skin was several shades darker than my own and oily, asked me if I would come instead to her apartment, so she could keep the entire fee, and where, I discovered, she lived with her husband, her son, and her father. Her daughter had left home, and there was enmity between them. Her husband, who’d hurt his back doing factory labor, was usually at home, staring out the window, a wide leather belt around his waist and lower back for support. I rarely saw her son, since when I was having my legs waxed, she set me on his bed in his bedroom. But I have my legs waxed now by the Polish woman, who has degrees and certificates in several of the cosmetic arts displayed prominently on the semi-transparent plastic wall of the small room in which she also waxes legs, for which a license is required, and I can’t remember all the reasons why I didn’t want, after a while, to return to the apartment of the other and first leg waxer, to whom I thought I should have been loyal but wasn’t.

  The Polish woman has almost no hair on her body, or hardly any that’s visible, except for light blond fuzz above her upper lip, so fair as to be negligible, though she might wax her lip and legs weekly, but now little grows back, which is what happens when hair’s waxed from the body repeatedly and diligently, it dies, except the most stubborn kind, which on my body is at the outer sides of my ankles, where cold probably most affects or touches it. But it is at my throat and neck that I feel cold most, and I have never had hair there, and the neck is also, next to the nipples, a place that, when kissed, licked, sucked, or, in most ways, touched, arouses me most quickly, and none of these parts, so quick to arousal, have hair on them. I don’t remember my nipples ever feeling cold. Hair is of little functional value to people, but hair does alter appearance, its amount, its curl, its thickness, its fineness, and hair products for men and women multiply dizzyingly on drugstore shelves. Male-pattern baldness, though, is especially curious, since it’s common to some extent to all men, even those who live in extremely cold climates, where it would seem necessary for protection. But human hair must be primarily for sexual attraction, and only second to indicate illness, since hair loss in men and loss and hirsutism in women are controlled by the steroid sex hormones; an abnormal appearance may also be a symptom of diseases produced by vitamin deficiencies—protein starvation, inadequate iron, or reactions to cytotoxic drugs, for instance, those used in chemotherapy. The Polish woman probably waxes her underarms, which sickens me, since waxing in tender areas, like the upper, inner thigh near the pubis, is painful, but the underarm must be worse, yet the Polish woman does it, as do many other women whose bodies I’ve noticed at the beach, where men and women, driven by hormones, desire, and social mores, cluster and expose themselves to the dangerous rays of the sun and to each other; women also, in changing rooms in stores, undress, and the exposed underarm, though hairless, is somewhat darker in hue than the rest of the skin of the body, as if indelibly stained or dyed.

  The woman who first waxed my legs had much more hair on her body than the Polish woman, though she also waxed often, but still the pores on her arms and legs, even her upper lip, were bigger and from them short black hairs, stubble, sprang vigorously from her oily, olive flesh. Regular shaving incites a hair follicle in its determination to thrive, so because I started the practice before I should have, the way my friends did, and I might need to wear stockings, tougher hair raised itself immediately through the pores of my sensitive skin, making my legs rough to the touch and irritants to each other. Soon rashes colored the areas around the short hairs, livid pink circles, and also some of the hairs turned inward, with small bubbles of flesh forming over them, in which the hair continued to grow and which, like a pimple, had to be squeezed, to release the fugitive hair follicle. Folliculitis is the inflammation of the hair follicle, and, as a girl, I enjoyed the outbreak of one or two. Hair is sometimes used to make art objects, woven into cloth, or braided into bracelets, and in 19th-century America it was common to keep locks of hair of loved ones, dead and alive, when women also wore hair lockets that hung from a velvet ribbon about the neck. I found some hairs from my dead father’s comb, but I don’t remember where I put them, they were very few, not an ample, coiled lock that might have represented him, but only a sample of his DNA, predictive threads, the body’s oracle.

  It’s easy to imagine the pain of having your underarms waxed, but I can’t imagine and never want to, because it would be very much worse, being a captive, hooded and locked in a hot or cold room, since suffocation is terrible, and asthmatics must understand the experience of being hooded without wearing a hood, or people with chronic eczema, who are imprisoned in their skins, condemned to scratching their itchy flesh until it bleeds, requiring some to be strapped down and disenabled from clawing the disturbed flesh off their bodies. Photographs of hooded prisoners cause me to gag; I immediately experience a loss of oxygen and inhibition of movement in horrible empathy, which is another reason I don’t read the newspaper, the way the you
ng married man does, at breakfast, but wait until a more appropriate time, not accompanied by food, just as when I read Naked Lunch, whose characters inhabited airless hovels and sought veins into which they could inject themselves, their blood squirting onto walls or dirty sheets. William Burroughs must have been transfixed by injecting himself, by the act of fixing itself, by the blood of his own body and others, so I needed to be selective about the novel’s place in my day. Burroughs loved cats and Colette, too, she was one of his favorite writers, and to her the cat was a talisman and companion, but I don’t imagine Colette or Burroughs wore images of animals on their shirts or coats, though they might have been tempted to buy a souvenir of an adorable cat, as I have been but didn’t, aware that it portends a slide into a vat of sentimentality. Colette was photographed with her cat and her dog, she loved cats and dogs but not her daughter, and she didn’t go to her mother’s funeral, though she wrote about her mother, Sido, as if she would have thrown herself onto her coffin during the funeral and buried herself, too. Burroughs was afraid to die, like my father but not my mother. Some say it’s simpler to love cats or dogs than mothers, or it can be more rewarding.