American Genius

by Lynne Tillman

  In a fabric warehouse, rolls of fabric, which are worlds in a world, beg to be touched. Satin, moire, voile, faille. Jacquard, cotton, silk, brocade. Opaque, transparent, or semi-transparent lengths of cloth. Possibilities array themselves in colors, patterns, warps and wefts, weights and textures, while description doesn’t account for what my fingers realize, which is uncategorizable. With a flourish, the polished salesman pulls out a bolt I have indicated, carries it on his shoulder or in his arms, like a body, and then pulling and stretching the fabric across a long wooden table, which usually has scissors and threads over it, it’s always messy in a fabric warehouse, the salesperson spreads a length of material across it, so that its details may be seen and appreciated, and any mistake in the weave might be caught, and then he, rarely she, grabs a tape measure and cuts the material. It is an event, the gestures and cutting of the material, a high, almost noble, moment in the warehouse, when, I have noticed, other salespeople will stop what they are doing to watch, attentively, a fellow salesman unfurl the bolt, wield the stubby scissors and cut the cloth. The salesman also always pulls out a little more material, making a display of this, too, in a ritual or tradition that all of them follow and which is habitually mentioned to a client, or else you would feel cheated, everyone wants and expects a little bit more than the yards paid for. I could easily stay with these mute bolts of cloth for hours and hours, but I never do, because I’m busy, rushing, so I stay as long as I permit myself, gently fingering the cloth, careful not to stain or otherwise damage the material, and occasionally buying some yards for friends who sew; I don’t, but my mother did, and often I merely want to have in my possession the redolent fabric, which appeals to a cosmopolitan primitive.

  THE SPAN BETWEEN BREAKFAST AND lunch is inconstant, unnervingly patternless, random. Theoretically, mathematically, randomness is impossible to produce, though on the ground there are traffic patterns, which come close to it, they are unpredictable because of error and accidents, but in most other things, especially numbers, there arrives a discernible pattern or logic. Generally, there is always less time between breakfast and lunch than between lunch and dinner. No one will go hungry, every resident knows that food will be supplied here, that lunch will ultimately arrive at our various doorsteps or we can visit the kitchen, but we don’t know precisely when lunch might be ready, because each day something occurs that may change the schedule of the male kitchen helper, rumored to be a college dropout or recently expelled, who usually brings it to each of us on bicycle. When that happens, as it does each day, almost without fail, so he is part of my day and habit, I have to decide whether to say hello to him, which might alter my and his late morning rhythms. He pretends that he doesn’t see us residents, so he won’t startle or annoy anyone, but I always see him, unless I’m tending the fire or in the bathroom, where I worry that the curtain won’t block me from view, and he might see me seated in an awkward, all too human pose. I tell myself it doesn’t matter if he does, but I also know that this view could become the one he’ll remember best, especially if it’s silly or sad, and he could report my behavior to the cook or assistant cook, financial officer, to the janitor or groundskeeper, or, if it’s especially peculiar, he might inform the director of the community, who could be called upon to speak with me privately and even caution me or put me on probation, which has happened but not yet to me. The staff talks about us the way we residents talk about them. The boy is handsome, especially on his bicycle, his long, strong legs, similar to other legs I’ve known, move automatically, and they distract me, since I particularly like long, strong legs, and recall those of a Dutchman, who, on a certain summer’s night, wore white satin trousers. We took pills that turned us to rubber, I awoke surrounded by others having sex or making love on the floor, wanted to go home, he followed and kept coming round, I lost interest, bored even with his legs, which in retrospect aren’t boring, and I wonder if they are as strong as they were then, if he cares for his body and exercises daily. It’s easy to be distracted, especially if you relish the past, dislike it, or wonder at its other, unchosen possibilities and also if you collect things, including mementoes, and deduce or speculate about the multitude of outcomes. Since I have good hand/eye coordination and reflexes, a slow pulse, and can run fast, I could’ve become a long-distance runner, but I didn’t, which I regret abstractly, I played tennis but didn’t relax my studies at the age of ten to practice eight hours a day, to train for the circuit, though training my body and thinking only of a backhand, forehand, when to approach the net and other techniques, might be the life I should have led rather than the one I do, and it still appeals to me. I am often sedentary, except I work standing up or squatting, and go for energetic walks and solitary night swims. I played chess, rode a dirt bike, liked multiplying and adding sums, memorized encyclopedia and dictionary listings, to keep my brain agile, was adept at setting my friends’ hair in curlers and tweezing their eyebrows, and I also enjoyed squeezing the pimples on the back of one boyfriend; I liked to draw, jump rope, dance, perform acrobatics, but heights made me dizzy, so jumping over horses in gym didn’t make sense as an activity. Instead I preferred to walk backward, do somersaults, act like a horse or dog or cat, even a vegetable, in dance class, read philosophy, American history, especially, and stories, and could diagnose medical problems, which, like my mother, I often accomplish with an accuracy some call intuition, though I don’t believe in intuition. But unlike her, I faint at the sight of blood gushing from a gash, so I couldn’t have been a doctor, and lose interest in reading some medical research material, though I’m attracted to the study of skin and genetics, especially as a model for the humanities and social sciences, since some aspect of your fate is carried in code from another’s body to yours, though the body’s not a stable foundation, as it reflects human ideas about it. It is, in a sense, both transparent and opaque, since, with study, like my dermatologist, you could read its signals, though a brain scan, an MRI, may be read differently by neurologists, whose knowledge is imperfect, or the object of their knowledge remains defiant, the sum greater than its parts, the parts in need of and subject to interpretation. Genetics proposes that people aren’t merely the sum of their parts, which somehow reassures me, we’re bits and pieces, and parts of bodies no longer have to be the bodies’ own parts, heads might be grafted, and there could one day be full-body transplants. Human beings lie in shreds of DNA in laboratories, studies for the future, designs for better-performing bodies, like car models in Californian and Japanese labs.

  I like the kitchen helper’s legs and his clear skin. He has good color. I have a strong sense of design and color, as my father did, but when I was young, I didn’t want to go into his business, though by the time he sold it, over my protests, like the house I loved, I contemplated joining him and my uncle, since looking at weaves and warps and studying color combinations satisfies me in ways other activities don’t. I like history, but it is slow. I am fast and quickly lose interest in things, and some people, and this dismays me, but I start and stop many reasonable pursuits. If I travel, I often take in where I am quickly and want to be somewhere else, though I’m aware that once in another place, I will feel similarly, so being where I am now, which I have come to not for the first time, isn’t for the sake of novelty, but rather for a less novel form of discovery or a pursuit of knowledge that requires my forswearing certain adventures that might take me far from myself, but I find it almost impossible to quit my mental meanderings, though I’ve arrived with a goal and want to make headway, like a person sailing in life toward a destination, hoping for accomplishment. I haven’t a passion for one thing only. I vacillate and gain or lose enthusiasm, and like a Don Juan might in love, I’m lost to the singular pursuit, disappointed that nothing is compelling enough, that I lose interest, or always want something else or more to sustain it. But mostly I lose my way to it because I’m easily distracted, the way another resident did. He stayed a short time, as he was permanently adrift, since nothing fully anim
ated him or gave him reason to live, and he said he would have wanted to have been a philosopher, since it was a calling, he told me, higher than any other except the priesthood, if he’d had the concentration or the energy. But instead he learned and mastered carpentry and became a devoted member of his church choir. He also muttered once that he was beginning to enjoy the luxury of impotence, something I’d never heard a man claim before or since, and, when he did, he gazed into the distance over my head. I thought I understood his melancholy, since it could have been like my own, though not about that type of impotence, but he also seemed foolish gazing into the distance, assuming a pose that might indicate a depth he didn’t actually possess. It was an attempt, though, to signify the pursuit or impossibility of headway. But then, I’m also aware that I may encounter a person who could change my life or an idea that could undo others I hold dear, which was reinforced by the card reader, and I want to believe his prophesy, and I do think that, while destinies are not carved in stone, I have a fate, that which has already been written, not alone by me but by forces bigger than myself, like an ocean’s mindless waves, since I believe that about the most important things in life human beings don’t have much choice. I am making do, unmaking too, being as watchful and free as I can with what I’ve been born into.

  I have certain choices after breakfast and before lunch; for example, I could go back to bed, or, if energetic, I might tackle a pressing problem and find its solution, though my optimism dissipates as hours go by when I don’t generally find a solution or answer to questions I pose myself, ones that challenge or haunt me. Then a minute elongates and seems greater than it is, during which I might accomplish nothing, time plodding on a barren highway, or time contracting, when, for instance, I haven’t noticed anything except what’s in front of me, a pair of scissors or a book, so I haven’t felt aware of being alive, sad or happy, and big hours become tiny minutes, and I don’t know, in the most prosaic sense, where time has gone. No one knows where time’s gone, and it may be that there’s no time, only the peculiar, winsome present, in which I seem to be alive, though I can also feel dead, like a diseased tree in the forest outside my picture window, which I watch as a season mutates infinitesimally, except when there is a sudden frost and buds die or a great wind chases all the leaves off a tree. But the dying tree I’m watching now hasn’t changed like that. I’ve watched several seasons change here, and no one ever knows where time has gone, but to me it’s in the faces of the people on the wall of my room who are gone, whose expressions never change, and because of that no time exists. I’ve heard that truth is the daughter of time, and on the slowest days, when I can hear the clock tick, and my heart, my second stomach, beat nervously, and nothing I’ve eaten satisfies me, and I don’t know what to do with myself, I can fantasize I’m time’s daughter, or believe I’m the Count’s, but not my father’s or my mother’s, because when I was a child and nothing pleased me, when I didn’t know what to do with myself, I blamed them for the lack of steady excitement, when I also didn’t recognize temporariness or finality.

  Leslie Van Houten’s parents divorced, and neither of them could have predicted her choosing Manson’s family over their amicably separated one, but she did, when she was nineteen, she came under his spell, though not as completely as some of the other girls, and she has been in jail for a long time, and will be kept there much longer, though she’s become a model prisoner, teaches other prisoners, has received a college degree, works on the prison newspaper, and could care for herself on the outside. At Leslie Van Houten’s 1991 parole hearing, her eighth, she wore a black-and-white checked cotton dress, a bold print, with a wide white collar, and white trim on its short sleeves, a dress like a house, too large for her, so that though she was tall and big-boned, she was dwarfed by the dress, an unfashionable one that might create the impression she was an administrator in a small midwestern company. Leslie answered the three parole commissioners’ questions in defense of her suitability to leave prison after twenty-two years. She clarified, as she had before, that she’d wiped off their fingerprints to look busy, so that she wouldn’t be asked to mutilate Mr. and Mrs. LaBianca, as Charlie wanted them to do, as Tex might have required of her, Tex might have asked her to do more, also, she said, and, when they were leaving, they took cheese and chocolate milk from the refrigerator. She believed in Charlie, did what he asked, and before they left the car to break into an anonymous middle-class suburban house, owned by the unsuspecting LaBiancas, he ordered them “to all do something.” It was like war, Leslie said. To her, then, Manson was Jesus Christ, and sometimes she read him passages from the Bible, but now when she reads the Bible, with her minister, she must push away that pernicious memory, to forgive herself for her terrible acts, which, after three years in prison, she began to recognize and for which she developed a strong sense of responsibility, but which, it appears, was absent before then, and for which she must now seek and allow herself some sort of peace, even forgiveness.

  THE RIGHT TO PURSUE HAPPINESS sends me and other Americans, even here where we are meant to resist outside temptation, on a hunt for it. If I’m not hungry, I might seek other forms of happiness, or pleasure, which is part of my American birthright, though the most misconceived of them or the most difficult to realize; I can pursue several means and ways to be happy, if I am able to forget what makes me habitually sad. The woman who hates me or may not hate me, since she abandoned all of her friends, must believe she has embarked upon a truly new life, but I wonder how she narrates its many divorces, more than just from her first and second husbands, by whom she had several children, since she has excised the past as if she were an immigrant and it the old country, with a language she no longer speaks. She was an expert horsewoman. Does she still ride? My own scale is teased by such questions, which I can’t restrain, and then, overtaken by cloudy intangibles, I might walk to my bedroom and go to sleep after breakfast, feeling smaller. Without looking at it, I easily forget my appearance, and my body can feel gigantic, but also not sturdy enough, or when I feel small, my scale reduced by puny conjecture, I could be a mole, my skin pulling and drawing, prickly, demanding that I shed it and everything else, too, to begin again in a common but unique American fantasy of life as an entirely different person with a virgin’s body, whose hymen, a membrane of thin skin protecting an essential orifice that, once penetrated, effects a change whose connotations defy it a single definition, and is also just another frontier. Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that “waves” of human movement westward defined the character of the American nation, an idea mostly disputed if not discredited now, but which held sway for a time, though when teaching it, I focused mostly on a single aspect: “In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave, the meeting point between savagery and civilization.” I told my high school seniors, after I’d banished myself from college teaching, that our American civilization can be treated as a series of periods of its individual colonists or members overcoming their own savagery, and because of this the American character retains a roughness and crudeness unlike the European or other civilizations. The students didn’t like my interpretation of the Frontier Thesis, and felt indicted by it, but I included I told them, and didn’t mind being compared with so-called savages or animals, which we were, too, and insisted on a nation’s theoretical similarity to a fetus’s development, in which ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, except, in the case of the American political and social body, the fetus is born over or born again, and the infant introduced into a new context, but without advancement, repeats it all. Not long after Turner published his paper, which he delivered first as a lecture in the 1893 World’s Fair, the Viennese architect and designer Adolf Loos, in his essay “Crime and Ornament,” used a similar ontological argument: “In the womb the human embryo goes through all phases of development the animal kingdom has passed through.” Loos compared ornamentation with criminality and degeneracy: “The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from obj
ects of everyday use.” The relationship between Turner and Loos marked a moment when thinking about American history and international art and design collided, at least theoretically, at the beginning of the 20th century, often called the American Century, and is the subject of another of my partially written essays, “Backward Movements in the Modern.” “We,” Loos wrote, “have the art that superseded ornament.” And, “those who go about in velvet jackets today are not artists, but clowns or housepainters.” I like velvet. Hubris and vanity hold hands with so-called progress, as well as with advances, innovation, and invention, so Loos’s words haunt me, as do Turner’s, because a mistake or failed idea can also detonate the imagination, since it may explode a period’s codes or unconscious habits and actions better than its successes, and much erupts from the erroneous. In Vienna, a city I visited with a friend whose accidental death I still can’t accept, often I stare at him in photographs, but also, more often, I don’t let myself and, instead, walk to the main house, fancying he will be waiting like a letter, though I know he won’t, just one of the disconsolate women, who vacillates as I do and doesn’t get done what she should, or the woman with chronic fatigue syndrome, who will be reclining on a couch reading or sleeping, my dead friend and I took an architectural tour. Walking about in the old, stately city, with its terrible, grand history, we hung on the words of our impassioned guide, while snow fell, the city’s first snowstorm in years, which coated us and it in white, my friend, whose mother’s ancestors had been slaves in Mississippi, pointed to the blizzarded sky and whispered impishly into my ear, “I think it’s telling us something.” The gentlemanly guide tutored us on Vienna’s place in architecture, art, and design, which reached its apex during the time Freud also lived there, at the start of the 20th century, and much of what the guide taught—dates and names—I’ve forgotten, though I remember we took him for pastries and coffee in a capacious coffeehouse where he sipped from a white cup, and my friend tipped him generously. Our guide accepted the money modestly, but most of what my dead friend said to me during those days is lost.