American Genius

by Lynne Tillman

  I pay for the English language book, along with a boy’s story, Adrift in New York, by Horatio Alger, which begins auspiciously, “Uncle, you are not looking well tonight,” as well as the pastoral postcard that I hope to mail but could also tack on my wall, and the shopkeeper nods her head under the stiff hat and mutters that her costume smells of mothballs, and, in a sweeping, balletic gesture, shucks off the stiff hat, revealing her flattened hair, which makes her seem childlike, hairless like a newborn, though some are born with full heads. I don’t ever wear a hat, though I might if I’d been ordered, lost a bet, or was paid a million dollars. I look silly in them. My vanity is exhausting, it sits uselessly in me, since the body lies, certainly the eye does. Ruskin wrote, “All literature, art, and science are vain, and worse, if they do not enable you to be glad.” Veins and vanity lie deep beneath our skins but can be more visible and on the surface in some of us. The pale blue veins on the backs of Contesa’s creamy beige hands delineate her script, since she believes much of life is told in and by the body, with which, in a sense, I concur, but her mysticism isn’t mine. She believes mostly in what can’t be known or seen, which also can’t be entirely dismissed, and in the numina which establish their spiritual, ghostly, or ethereal presence wherever she is, and this reality is confirmed and evinced by the fact that, when she found her Kafka, who died of tuberculosis, she contracted pneumonia, and her lungs inflamed in a physical emulation of her intimate tie to him. Now she has the beginnings of emphysema.

  I haven’t told her about the tarot card reader. His oracular statements echo and vibrate internally, just for me, and their truths or falsehoods are also mine, that is, I know I am also, I live as, in some sense, my arbitrary selection of his predictions. The tarot card reader’s blemishes weren’t distracting, they were not even notable, it was mostly his hands and lopsided mouth I watched when he announced, portentously, Ah, let’s see what happens. He contemplated the three rows of cards and explained that there was the past, present, and future. The high cards were in the middle, the past on top, and there were the qualifiers, the details, he said, which he explained but which I didn’t catch even as he spoke. A woman sat in the middle, he said, that’s you, but he didn’t look at me then, for which I was glad. He told me that fives were not bad, since they were in the middle range, and I had two fives on either side of the present or the past, but I remember he said: Coins dot the table, you have more of those than anything else; and logically, I thought, he started at the past, where, he said, lifting up a card, there was the last judgment. Look, the angel is blowing his horn into the skies and the dead are rising out of their coffins.

  Even now this harrowing image sits inside many others, but maybe it won’t come to pass too soon.

  It was the recent past that the cards showed, which was behind what lay before us, like a settling of accounts after which you could clear the table. I liked this idea of clearing the table of the past. I also like tables, but not as much as chairs. This suggests, he continued—he looked me in the eye—some epoch has closed. I thought of many things, including the man who no longer lived with me whose presence was a comfort and a bother, or comfort itself was a bother, as I fear complacency, and so I threw out the baby with the bathwater, when I should have, I’d heard, kept the bathwater. The reader now said, You may be starting something new—it is not a break, a rupture, but in the sense we use the word now, a closure or resolution, and so the thing has been completed and makes some ground from which to proceed. These characters are resurrecting into a new life in heaven. They’re not just finished. But this period is done for you.

  His sensible hands appeared to have done manual labor, each finger had calluses, though only his index and third fingers on his left hand were stained from nicotine. They fluttered and danced over the cards to draw more prophesy. His lopsided mouth was probably his best feature, and I waited to hear my fate from it. He said, alarming me, that the exception proves the rule—these two in the present—coins, worry, and this heart, disappointment, and my handmaidens—heartbreak and worry in the world—they’re fives, in the middle—two fives—well balanced—they’re probably true for you anyway most of the time—the heart card equals a crush—it could be your work or a person—but it’s mastered in the outcome—the queen is a master, so she can handle it, and improve the situation immeasurably—you might not have the problem again—it could be financial disappointment—but you lose something, and get to keep the rest—they follow exactly—you do hard work and some goes to waste-premature excitement of the heart and there’s a letdown—just like real life—this is a monkey holding a mirror up to this girl who’s doing her toilette—it’s a very old image—it may have to do with the mockery of vanity, an opposition to vanity.

  My vanity isn’t merely useless when it makes me glad, though it does gladly waste my days. The circumspect widow’s vanity mostly didn’t make her glad, since it allowed her to marry a man who humiliated her and about which she said nothing, so she also cohabited with heartbreak and worry, believing that it’s better not to say anything. Leslie Van Houten vainly insisted during the penalty phase of her trial that LSD did not make her follow Manson’s orders to murder, to helter skelter, to stab Mrs. LaBianca, or to wipe off her own fingerprints, which, if she hadn’t done, might have earned her a lighter sentence, because destroying any evidence, erasing traces of venal acts, though Mrs. LaBianca might have already been dead when she stabbed her, indicated Leslie knew what she was doing was wrong, and that alone distinguishes a person who is legally sane from one who is not. It wasn’t LSD, Leslie avowed, “it was the war in Vietnam and TV” Leslie Van Houten’s history includes mine, the town’s is also mine, since I’m an American, and outside, the kitchen helper’s bicycle lies on the ground in front of the café, so I could discover what makes him tick, young, gawky, full of piss, longing, and very pretty, and he might be interesting no matter what he says, but I never used to think that everyone young was pretty, but lately I do, and so was I, once. After JFK was assassinated, hippies appeared, and young myself, I observed them, startled, since they came out of nowhere, kids on the street, runaways, they’d left newly broken homes, colleges, jobs, the girls with long, straggling hair, flowers in it, who wore long cotton dresses, boys with thin, wavy hair, in blue jeans and sprouting ragged tufts of beard, everyone like rag dolls, and I was so very young and pretty then, too, unaware and untouched, bewildered and removed. The girls let hair grow on their legs and carried flowers some days, daffodils, the boys appeared stretched to their limits, so long and skinny, new to sex and redfaced under their uncertain facial hair, awkward, they all were, dumb and eager about life, and everyone was pretty in an insipid, unmenacing way, the way the kitchen helper is now, as youth seems now, when years ago, at that age, I would have noticed their imperfections, and mine, the way I still do. But their flaws don’t matter, because like kittens and puppies, the young are adorable, which can protect them from predators, though children and their predators is a vast subject, and also it’s debatable what a child is. Kennedy’s was the common death of the common father, and after it, the cortege snaking its way home to a national graveyard, the children went wild, loose and suddenly orphaned, wandered around the streets, talking about peace and love, or, in squalid, urban tenements that their parents had fled years before, they stirred tasteless, watery soup in communal pots, and everyone young was for rock music and sex, against war, straining for pleasure, wanting a bit of strange. Everywhere was disarray. I dreamed JFK was my father, my father was an anxious man, he especially feared rats and heights, and years later I still remember the dream vividly, along with my shock at discovering I was JFK’s daughter, but now I think I was in some way. Memory is motivated, while the uncontrollable stories people tell themselves during REM sleep reveal unbidden messages experienced with scant awareness of their warnings. Awake, sense memories, like some friendships and all snowflakes, dissolve.

  In my version of history in which all are renegade children, I
confound memory and dream, or nightmare, the minute with the monumental, private and public. I heard about Malcolm X’s murder on the radio. I heard a TV newsman announce that Martin Luther King had been shot. I ran to the set and kneeled in front of it. I watched TV reruns of Robert Kennedy’s murder. I wasn’t involved in demonstrations or protest marches, I was engaged in a singular battle with the world, and the world kept intruding and winning. I witnessed events and was often sleepwalking, but anyway I opened the door wide, and many singular, deranged people entered, and I thought they were angels. Manson told Leslie he was God, a stranger named Mel told me he was, but I didn’t fall under his spell, while others flew into his godlike arms, like my childhood friend Johnny and a girlfriend called Buckle, whose mother had painted abstractions in the suburbs, who was different from other mothers and whose daughter was haughty and knowing, but anyway Buckle fell to Mel and disappeared, while Leslie succumbed to Manson, not totally or not as much as the other girls, who were older, but even though less submissive to him, she has been imprisoned for life. Three years after Buckle and Johnny’s god died, possibly murdered by a distraught follower, his band dispersed throughout the land, and I don’t know what happened to them, though I wonder, since Johnny and I went to grade school, when everyone was pretty, and he was one of my little boyfriends, with thick black hair, clear pink skin that turned scarlet in blushes, and a timorousness about life I could see even when we were twelve. I remember him, small and already wary, hiding behind a tree, but I didn’t foresee he’d search for a messiah. I walked out of his life and Buckle’s, my brother walked out of mine, and when something I suspected might annihilate me rose to the surface like scum, I vanished or disappeared inside myself, since I thought I knew what could destroy me and, actually, I’d mandated myself to protect my mind, but I didn’t know what to do with my body, didn’t want to obey its laws, blood, curves, holes, and I didn’t care about it, was profligate with it, and still nothing of it could be forgotten, nothing.

  THE CAFÉ IS STEAMY, ITS brown wood walls suffocatingly close and similar to most establishments’ here, except when their walls are painted glossy white to cover wear and rot. There was hardly any light when I opened the squeaky door with a bell whose annoying tinkle announces all new-comers, but I quickly spotted the kitchen helper and his two buddies and instantly regretted my decision to enter. Yet I enter, having chosen this adventure or outing, and he calls out, embarrassed, “Want to join us?” and I do that also. The TV is radiating like a fire in one corner of the room, the café owner, also dressed in 18th-century costume with a wide leather belt and clunky metal buckle pressing comically into his round belly, is in the other, but his traditional vest, adorned with several contemporary metal buttons, announces his green and other tastes. Residents of the eclectic community of strangers I represent, even fleetingly, amuse the local townspeople, who view us as special, obnoxious, or queer, and some desire our business or conversation, which might be why the kitchen helper has beckoned me to his table, to meet his friends, and where, surprisingly, I’m confronted by a comparatively small light-wood chair, with an oak frame, a seat and back of birch veneer designed by Jean Prouvé in 1945. It’s a chair I love, since it and feels right, and I concur with Peter Smithson that “it could be said that when we design a chair we make a society and city in miniature.” It’s a cozy proposition I also nestle into when I sit on this chair, akin to a school chair, and I’m with schoolboys. Its molded back holds mine, the way the Eames chairs at home did, so I settle into it with familiarity and smile expectantly at the café owner in his historical gear, order an American coffee, and ready myself to listen to the kitchen helper and his two friends, who are, like him, awkward, but one is fat, the other skinny, and their thighs and asses are lost in vast stretches of heavy cotton or denim that swim around their worried bodies. Each drums his foot on the floor. The skinny one’s pock-marked face is lean and pointed, arresting in its intensity, while the fat one’s is a fiery red presumably from a heat treatment or way too much B6, or niacin, and they’re talking about papers and tests, a local band called Killer Crank, and a buddy busted for weed. I watch the pearly face of the kitchen helper, whose eyes fasten on mine, half-smiles shyly but inquisitively, but then I withdraw my eyes to gaze upon the warm screen in the corner, since TV is a friendly face, though many frown upon it. Every resident could watch it in a small lounge, off the third floor, in the library, if they desired, though most didn’t, or, alone, they could listen to the radio, if the speakers’ broadcast-worthy voices didn’t become cloying to them as they do me, but everywhere TV can make life more bearable, since it’s always the same, and when conditions are not of your making, and there may not even be the appearance of choice, though TV doesn’t offer abundant choices, especially if you receive only network programs, a sad or silly problem on the box lets an evening pass in relative tranquility. When I was a child, looking at TY, even as my parents argued about which programs I should watch, I felt invincible, because I threw myself into my mind as if it were a place of protection, and believed it didn’t matter what TV programs I watched, and also felt I could visit other bodies or be many people, like those in books, movies, or on TY, mostly female, sometimes male, though from that pretense I was dissuaded by the shadowy presence of my brother, as well as others who encouraged and discouraged me. When my brother vanished, there was nothing to say, I suppose my parents whispered interpretations in their bedroom, where my father’s dresser stood on one wall, his coins and cigar humidor on it, taller than my mother’s, which spread across another wall of the spacious room, her sewing machine near my father’s dresser, there were white cotton-and-linen shades on the four windows, white fustian, or cotton and linen, curtains, also, but I was too young to understand my brother, they said, and they didn’t, either, but this old story of irrationality underwrites any tale of love or hate, since men and women are great, illegible subjects for each other, along with their families, cats and dogs, all of which reach an end, anyway.

  Unfinished as these boys beside me are, they are sufficient, just like the boys I knew as a girl, though in the present we’re divided by period or time or generation and age, but it also doesn’t matter what has separated us when I listen to them and watch the TV in its cozy, habitual corner, and yet don’t hear much, either. I’m seriously considering inquiring of the café owner if I can buy the chair I’m sitting on, a precious, valuable misfit in this bizarre room, with its chaotic accumulation of chairs, more like a scattering of mismatched shoes, where everything is helter skelter. The boys’ sincere discussion of their college friends in trouble with the law, or some dropouts like them, or kids broken by excoriating love, instigates blurred snapshots of fast cars on stoned streets, greasy-haired girls and bearded, hunky guys, and I say, “When she was young, Leslie Van Houten supposedly beat her adopted younger sister with a shoe,” and the kitchen helper asks who Leslie Van Houten is, and I realize, or acknowledge, that I have reached the age when I have to tell everything I know.

  THERE WAS STILL LESS LIGHT in the room, and the mild darkness incited the past to recur as a sequence of sepia-tinted slides on the room’s brown walls, and the faces of the boys melted into those warm walls. I warmed to my subject, my skin rosy with passion and heat, and explained: “Some Americans think it was Manson who ended the 1960s, along with a rock concert at Altamont, where the Rolling Stones sang and the Hell’s Angels acted as cops, and they stabbed to death a black man right in front of the stage. Everyone who hated the protests against the war”—“which war,” the skinny boy asks; “Vietnam,” I say—“and civil rights, women’s rights, sexual liberation”—at this they all leaned toward me—“just lots of people think Manson’s gang and those murders, their murder spree, sum it up, that’s what the Sixties were. So because of that, Leslie Van Houten will probably never get out of jail. Even though people who murder, and she was just an accomplice, usually get out in seven years. She looks like a secretary now, she’s had a lot of sun. She’s in ja
il in California, and you can tell from her skin, she doesn’t protect it, not that I would either, probably, in jail for life, except for a fear of skin cancer. She’s been up for parole at least fourteen times. Most recently the judge tried to help her, but she’ll never be forgiven.”

  It’s not just history to me the way it is to them, but they listen with some curiosity, their bodies ever restless, shifting with nowhere to go, but now my coffee cup is empty, and I might also be finished, while the kitchen helper’s presence has turned as insubstantial as a leaf fallen on the ground. I believe I’ll soon leave his long, strong legs and beguiling vulnerability, since even desire can’t keep me, though I’d like it to, because what then keeps me anywhere, except duty or obligation, though I’m not sure to what, but when I watch him, I don’t feel the lust I want, and instead rise to ask the café owner about the Prouvé chair. Bemused, he says he’ll think about it, that I should return, but I bet he won’t let me buy it because he’s cunning and knows it’s worth a lot. The kitchen helper looks at me, confused and muted with abstract longing, and I could rent a room in an historic inn, where I might stumble upon the Polish aesthetician and her friends, and invite him into it, to disappear with me for a time, and he might, he would, and now I think it’s either the chair or him, since both could provide comfort or be a distraction from what I believe I must accomplish. Near the bar, where the café owner looms over the cozy, light-deprived room, in his 18th-century gear, a frail woman with red ridges on her thin face, which mark it like rings on a tree trunk, remarks adamantly to her balefully attentive female companion, “If I had the money, I’d have my entire face planed.” Her skin shouts of that rough adolescence my dermatologist explicated, her teenaged years spent buying pimple concealers to cover unsightly red bumps and holes, picked at with furious hands and nails raking the skin, and her sobbing in a bedroom in a modest two-story house near here.