American Genius

by Lynne Tillman

  THE DISCONSOLATE YOUNG WOMAN, OFTEN listless and withdrawn, fearful of exposure, hiding more than her anorexia, a flamboyant symptom, is careful and circumspect, but she and the tall balding man have been flirting ever since he arrived. The staff discourages such behavior but it is not forbidden, while the staff may not become romantically engaged or fornicate with residents, though it’s happened once or twice I’m told. The tall man, a formidable systems analyst, is a striking if severe figure, and his baldness is only male-pattern baldness, often he wears a baseball cap to cover it; but on some days he takes it off and displays his scalp. It is not Alopecia areata, which, in the male, shows itself in the late twenties or early thirties, and is characterized by a rapid, complete loss of hair, first in patches, usually on the scalp, the bearded area, then the eyebrows and eyelashes, and, rarely, the other hairy areas of the body. With some, there is a total loss of scalp hair, which is called Alopecia totalis. When it’s lost over the whole body, it’s Alopecia universalis. It was first described twenty centuries ago by Celsus, but its cause is still unknown, though emotional stress is most frequently mentioned. But even impacted wisdom teeth might have an effect. My dermatologist explained that it could have been incurred first by trichotillomania, a psychiatric disorder which shows itself mostly in children, when the parent might notice sizable, persistently bald patches on the scalp, or in the female adolescent, when she plucks her hair, strand by strand, and that could incite Alopecia, but generally it’s not the case. The appearance of the neurosis, trichotillomania and also trichokyptomania, in which hairs are broken off instead of torn out, has increased since the advent of TV, he said, about which interpretation I wanted to ask more, but he’s a busy man. There is usually a characteristic mother-daughter relationship disturbance, with various borderline psychoses, and many sufferers require psychiatric help. But the tall man’s is only male-pattern baldness, and few residents have noticed the two, except Contesa and myself, though neither of us expected a serious involvement, which was, in a sense, manifested this morning, but we’d observed that the two watched each other for signs of interest and flirted harmlessly, which is often how brief libidinal investments are characterized. The young woman may believe she can change, even transform, him, so that his poor shoulders straighten and that she might rest her head on them, or that she will lift his spirits in other ways, compel him to shed his carapace and grow a new one. I see them mostly at a distance, though sometimes I have moved nearer, to hear what they say. He fences, a parry-and-thrust dialogist, while she picks words slowly, as she does food, pushing most aside, hoping to hit upon the best one, to please her sense of truth or her companion’s sensibility.

  —The worst thing is it’s not over yet-we’re not safe, the disconsolate woman says haltingly.

  —Safety’s everyone’s Maginot Line, the tall balding man teases.

  —What’s the marginal line? she asks.

  The disconsolate woman tenses, reddens.

  —Mag-i-not. Maginot Line. In World War I, the French expected the German army couldn’t attack across its border. Couldn’t penetrate it, but they did. Voila.

  —There’s no safety, then, she says.

  —Here?

  HERE, STRANGERS ARE THRUST TOGETHER, intimately, eating two meals together, whose intake betrays them, and, as I eavesdrop on their conversations at breakfast, still drowsy and inside a dream, like one about Saint Bartholomew, of whom I knew nothing, preaching inside a Gothic church, until I looked up his name, which turned out to be my father’s in Hebrew, I am wary that my day might get off to a bad start and proceed badly, so I try to be careful about what I swallow and absorb. Living with unfamiliar persons who will never be more than relative strangers, whom I awaken at night by going to the bathroom and flushing the toilet, since I usually get up twice in the night, I can have fitful dreams. I have dreamed of tiny mice, who, though adorable, are nuisances and must be destroyed, I have watched them die slowly and in agony on glue traps, which I chose rather than traps that beheaded them, because I thought it more humane, but when I watched the mouse squirm with pain, I realized it wasn’t, or, if Contesa has again spoken of Kafka and Felice and showed me their pictures not long before I go to bed, I dream about them, who are strangers to me, as is Contesa, relatively. She believes she knows Kafka, especially through his letters to Felice, though she can’t know Felice that way, her letters to Kafka aren’t extant, but still it is by her faith in their intellectual and spiritual connection that they invade my unconscious world. Felice’s pleasant, homely face was oily and dry in patches, even scaly, and around her nostrils an irritated aureole of pimples the size of pinpricks. She broke out in welts, red hives on her back and thighs, just as she was about to meet Kafka, who looked like the tall balding man, but was wearing a frayed black business suit. Felice, like the disconsolate woman, but much stouter, stood at the door to the café discreetly rubbing her thigh. Suddenly she was terribly skinny, suddenly, and her digestion was poor, so there was a terrible smell coming from her mouth, like the breath of the demanding man, she wasn’t a vegetarian like Kafka, and horrified she ran away and fell down. She tore the skin on her leg, and the ragged wound bled furiously, so in my dream I became dizzy and nauseated. Her skin inadequately protected her, it now flaked like snow on her cheeks, as dry as mine. But skin is the agent of the body that protects its other organs, by covering them, and by being an information station that allows the other organs, my doctor explained patiently, to adjust to changes in the outer environment. My condition, dermatographia or dermatographism, skin writing, is not life-threatening, but because of it my skin tingles, pulses, and itches, and if I were to stroke my arm with a fingernail, white lines would surface and be visible for at least fifteen minutes, as my skin releases histamines, which produce swelling, and this occurs in about ten percent of the population, but the swelling is not a hive, since in dermatographia only raised lines surface, which resemble writing on the skin. My dermatologist says friends could leave messages on my back, but they’d fade quickly. The skin is a barrier against dehydration; it can lower body temperature by the increased evaporation of sweat; it synthesizes keratin, a flexible, durable, and resistant protein. Keratin is available in some shampoos, but it is likely not helpful, since my dermatologist has often remarked that expensive skin products do little or nothing, that people, women especially but also men, are fooled regularly, though now there is surgery to correct the aging body that produces quick, sometimes disastrous results. If even the skin fails, then much worse can be expected to follow. The skin reveals and encloses, too, its failings are revelatory, failure is more revelatory than success. Contesa believes that Kafka despaired and reveled in writing’s failures, its fundamental inadequacy to the experience of life, that he was stern with himself but failure for him was expected, since it was true and exigent. In my dream of a severe Berlin winter, even the skin around Felice’s fingernails cracked and bled. I believe Contesa is writing something, but she doesn’t talk about it, and here silence and circumspection are honored, when in the outside world, they usually aren’t, since people want to find out what may help or harm them.

  MONTHS AGO, WHEN THE SECOND or assistant cook arrived, she was in the kitchen and around the dining room first at breakfast, then at dinner, when she had met the standards set by the head cook, and, instantly, she reminded me of Leslie Van Houten, because her hands were unsightly, she was a nailbiter, and though she was clean and scrubbed, a reluctance or remorse in her stained her solid body and made it unsightly, and, though armored, or because, she had an almost palpable vulnerability. I couldn’t imagine her life outside these walls. I liked but nearly pitied her, though pity’s a disgraceful emotion, for, though younger than the head cook, she waded in a shallow trough of regret where she was stuck, exposed and raw, and couldn’t crawl out, like the animals trapped in the swamp less than six feet under my family’s lawn. During the winter, when the ground was frozen, when the wind whipped my face and seemed to penetrate places
it shouldn’t have, my father drove me to the ocean, whose waves were dark without the sun to lighten their mood. Without sun to warm the sand, I didn’t run barefoot or stroll at the edge of the ocean, the border to the safety of my world. I thought then my father didn’t love my mother, but that she loved him and dressed well for his approval, except when she stayed at home doing housework, which she hated, but she always dressed in good materials, silk, cashmere, fine wools; I can’t remember if the fabrics were usually his. She applied the same brand of real red lipstick to her lips for years from a golden tube kept in the bathroom of the house I loved but which was sold against my protests, along with other precious objects, like the Eames chairs and table, or thrown out, like my childhood relics, mercilessly, or she carried it in her pocketbook when she and my father went out to dinner or the theater and opera, where my father might fall asleep. My mother’s devotion to one lipstick brand and color, like my father’s to his gray Buick, signaled a consistency or even a character to them, I thought when I was young, and even though I often hated both of them, especially my mother, I admired their capacity for devotion. But it wasn’t the case, I realized, for to other things, more important ones, my parents weren’t devoted, like our cat and my dog.

  Our family cat, who was the uxorious companion my father wasn’t, who followed my mother when she shopped or visited neighbors, walking by her side like a dog, also regularly followed my mother into the bathroom and watched her apply her red lipstick. The cat once stayed behind after my mother, who had neglected to close the lipstick tube, left it on the sink, and later the cat emerged, her lips and mouth as red as my mother’s, and it was this cat my mother and father abandoned to a shelter, to be killed, and it may have been then my brother abandoned us, I’m not sure, since coincidence plays a role in memory, contorts it or condenses events, mostly in the rememberer’s favor, as memory has the subject’s limits, and we forget much more than we remember, with little or no control over it, though its insistence at having happened can determine our fates, that is, how we speak about the past and consequently live in the present, but he did run away around then, I’m pretty sure, for which my father condemned him, since my brother might have saved the business. Now, when my mother talks in her sleep, and I sometimes stand at the foot of her bed, with her devoted cat whom she rarely pets beside her, she addresses her dead husband and tells him, “I have a cat, and you should see how adorable she is, she plays with me, and puts her paw on my face and then I stroke hers like silk.”

  Silk was discovered in the 13th century. Silkworms feed on mulberry bushes, seeds of which were smuggled in the socks of Buddhist monks who carried them to the West. The soft wool of the angora goat made a fabric called camlet, and it was imported into England from the Near East; earlier, in the 1st century BC the Chinese brought textiles to the Mediterranean by camel caravans. Bruges had 40,000 looms in the 13th century, and in the 15th century, Italians tried to limit silk wearing to the upper classes, but they couldn’t. It was once believed that the love of finery caused women to become prostitutes. In the Renaissance, the center of silk production was Lucca, Venice was famous for ribbons, Naples decorative trimming, and when I enter a warehouse of fabrics, textures and colors undulate, like a harem of dancing men and women, and material sensation runs riot. I breathe in a variety of pungent smells that blend into the aromas which wafted in my father and uncle’s office, its stockroom, especially, where the stockboy, Junior, worked. When I’m around textiles, I sometimes wonder if he is still alive and what he’s doing, the way I do the black women who worked in our house, and the son of Harriet with whom I roller skated. Harriet took care of me, and later Cassie cleaned the house for my mother. Cassie worked for my mother for ten years, she was a squat, cocoa-colored woman with sharp black eyes, whose son died of a heroin overdose, though I didn’t know that when I was ten, when I was given my dog for Christmas. I knew nothing about her life, except what there was of it in our house, since she was very quiet, though I was rude to her sometimes, but she never spoke to me or even glanced at me. She appeared neat and solemn, and my mother picked her up at the bus station and returned her there at the finish of her workday.

  THE ASSISTANT COOK WAS AT breakfast this morning. On some days she will cook eggs after breakfast is officially over, and then the latecomer feels inordinately grateful. On some days even her forbearance is limited, and she averts her eyes from the pleading face of the latecomer and says, I’m sorry, you’re late, and returns to her kitchen duties, wiping a countertop or closing a jar, an insignificant activity that further humiliates the latecomer. But that is that, there is no talking to her, no cajoling will affect her resolve to shut down the kitchen and go home. I don’t know what happens in her home, and sometimes when she keeps the kitchen open, I think she is being kind or delaying her return there, because of a problem at home, since everywhere there are problems, though we are not supposed to think of the staff’s problems, only of our own, which here we can or might ignore or resolve, but whether anyone can change enough to uncover a solution not previously in evidence is questionable. Some of the staff were once residents, and recognize our challenges and difficulties with more sympathy or even empathy than others might, having once experienced them themselves; but for the same reason, they can also be indignant and less patient. Breakfast can be a hopeful time, except when the head cook is on duty, since she never allows latecomers into her kitchen, and sometimes even takes away the bread outside the kitchen proper that could be made into toast, abating someone’s hunger, and unlike the other, younger cook, she never relents. But since there is something for everyone, breakfast can still mostly be a time for optimism, which is regularly in short supply at the other meals. The other two meals are more complicated, coming when they do in the day, for one thing, and the cook, to achieve the feat of pleasing a highly diverse set of palates and food prohibitions, must prepare many more different kinds of meals, but few residents are ever fully satisfied. Sometimes no one is satisfied, and almost never are all satisfied. There are omnivores, carnivores, dairy eaters, nondairy or lactose-intolerant eaters, fish and egg but no red-meat eaters, vegans, raw-food eaters, lifelong vegetarians, some of whom feel sick at the sight of red meat and others who don’t, and everyone claims to be sensitive. Hitler was a vegetarian who loved animals, but the head cook who cooks regularly and never has facials who has been here many years is not.

  The head cook labors, unfulfilled, pleasing fewer and fewer people, and it is rumored she may quit, or retire, and as she has given so many of her years to this place, her purported leave-taking, or desertion, as some residents have insisted, has upset many of the residents or fellows who are here all year and even some, like myself, who are frequent guests, because though the food is sometimes terrible, the cook’s fate has implications for us all, and change is often worse. So when I enter the kitchen, I try to be calm, to modulate or moderate my ceaseless demands, because while I’m also often dissatisfied, I’m not sure it has anything to do with the food the cook prepares, to accommodate so many people, though I also have complaints and wants that go unfulfilled. Food is easy to complain about, and everyone thinks, or most believe, they have the right to complain about it, but not about money and sex, and these topics at breakfast or dinner might provoke strong adverse comment, so usually they’re avoided, while response to what has been served on big china platters is ordinarily whispered out of the cook’s hearing, though some believe she hears everything, and this is why she is leaving. On occasion the forbidden topics arise, and, like farts, they leave a rank odor in the cozy dining room.

  On another morning, two months before, though time is shapeless here, the gentle-faced woman, Violet, whom I secretly named Contesa, sat alone, her eyes hidden, as was her habit, by dark glasses, which she wore because, she once explained impatiently, her aging eyes were ultra-sensitive to light, perhaps it was night-blindness during the day, she kidded. She was tucked into a corner reading a tome, whose pages she’d turned back an
d whose many underlinings were evident even from the place I sat near the two disconsolate women and another female resident whose face and figure I can no longer remember. Somehow I recall her as a fugitive, though from what I can’t remember. Contesa arose and arrived at our table, amused and vexed, as she had just read of an incident that restored to her, in detail, an event which she’d forgotten for years. Her uncle had taken her and her older sister to the country, where they had stayed in a hotel which allowed colored people—perhaps her mother, she said, was in labor again—and where the sheets on the bed she shared with her older sister were heavily starched. The movement and subsequent rubbing of the top sheet against the sensitive nipples of her prepubescent, budding breasts excited her to her first climax. While Contesa spoke, her eyes darted from side to side, returning mentally to that time, it appeared, so she didn’t observe the others at the table to whom this information might have been unwanted, since a discussion of sex, in any form, or any intimacy might never be appropriate or might cause embarrassment. But hers was not a case of anomia, the nonrecognition of objects by any of the five senses, or anoia, idiocy, that might have given license to Violet, or Contesa, but rather, I thought, it was her greater age and the common, divergent femaleness we shared, and then, as part of her off-color wisdom, as she put it, she offered us a page from Ars Amatoria and strolled languidly—she liked exaggeration—to her chair, where she again entered her book without concern for her most recent effect upon us. I wondered if it was by Kafka or about Felice, though that seemed unlikely. The disconsolate woman who was not psoriatic had other complaints, she was lactose intolerant, suffered from frequent attacks of tendinitis in her left arm, asthma, and she explained that Ars Amatoria was the Art of Love or of sex, and Lois, or Spike, who had read the old book, listed some methods from it to excite your partner, while I noted, silently, that Contesa was in fact wearing a starched blouse, and it could have been the sensation of the stiff linen, along with what she read, conjuring an image or even a single resonant word, matched to the feeling on her skin, which brought to the surface of consciousness the long-forgotten erotic memory. Aloud, I repeated some terms from the outdated sex manual I’d discovered in our library, to return and restore Contesa’s disclosure to the texture and pattern of our daily activity and also to shift the discussion to safer topics. Apanthropia was the morbid love of solitude and an aversion to human society, while a plutomaniac was one who thought he was rich. I had known one, I said, which wasn’t exactly true. Somehow all of this conversation, but especially Contesa’s memory, disturbed me, since the surprising return of this sensual memory indicated the magnitude of the burial of mostly everything one has experienced, and why I held some memories, and not others, why they asserted their dominance and became my history, piqued my disquietude. Soon I left the cheerful breakfast room, to return to my bedroom for a rest.