American Genius

by Lynne Tillman

  Opening the café door brought me to near-collision with the odd inquisitive woman from the residents’ library, who was, like the kitchen helper, on a bicycle, but hers was rickety, as she herself might be described, and when she was forced to slow down and jump off it, rolled her bike near to me, and I became aware of the blotchiness of her skin against the dove-gray sky. She, flustered from her sudden stop, declared:

  —Some people are full of hate. Have you thought about it?

  —I think about hate, I say.

  —What do you think?

  —I don’t know, I don’t know you. Or, are you also still talking about men?

  —You’re waiting for what kind of other information about people?

  —There are other subjects than men, but the way you put it the other day, men are important. Some people are filled with hate. I’ve known some.

  —Yes, they are. Listen, you don’t know what’s what. I can see that right off. Look at the sky!

  A motorcycle roared by, I looked up, I wasn’t sure what she pointed to, the sky high up was a pale blue, so pale it was thin, a few cumulus clouds, and her words were garbled by the sound of the engine. But I heard her say, “The people you believe are your friends aren’t . . .” Then I couldn’t hear her, as the bike roared again. Next I heard: “But you have to stop thinking there’s more to life than what’s right here before you. Look, you’re at a crossroads.” She pointed at the ground beneath us and smiled at herself, me, her words, I don’t know, and then it was, “Goodbye, I’ll see you again soon enough.”

  The odd inquisitive woman clamped her lips together, climbed onto her bike, and rode off, which was when I noticed she was wearing jeans from The Limited, baggy ones, incongruous on her as a tuxedo, and I wondered if they might have been a son’s or nephew’s; whether she bought all her clothes at secondhand stores or church sales, or if she stole. I looked around, to see what’s what, and discovered that she and I were at what might be considered a crossroads in this small, quaint, early American town, where the main road shot off in two directions, which struck me as funny, also what she pronounced about me, and even if it was presumptuous, I couldn’t entirely dismiss it, since I’d been stung by the card reader’s prediction and because I like to hear advice and warning, and have often asked people to tell me something I don’t know, tell me what to do, or, more urgently I ask, what would you do in my place, though I may not do it, but tell me anyway, because I’m curious. Occasionally people declare this eccentric or think I’m lazy and unimaginative, but I appreciate arbitrary direction, since mostly I have no choice, not about where I was born or to whom, into what skin or sex or town, and another person’s vision presents an alternative to which I could say no, or it might be an option entirely unusual for me, one I’d never think of Some of my friends might not be my friends, this has happened, but is that an obstacle, unless the friend is an enemy, who actively works against me, to thwart my progress or freedom to advance in life, to the extent anyone can, as a rejected suitor did by blocking me from tenure in our department, with his lies to the chair, but it is history, and I have left the field. Another friend manipulated me, wanted things from me, and, when she had them, she worked against me. She is most likely a pathological liar, whose cover was to complain that everyone else lied about her. Some people steal and lie all the time. The skin doesn’t lie, my dermatologist says, and chronic and acute pain also don’t, though they may have no organic basis. Acne comes and goes in a sufferer’s life, though it sometimes can be cured, but still its depressions, pits, and holes leave traces and last, and like an eerie memento can remind others of what the person endured during adolescence. My dermatologist insisted twice, rare for him, because he’s economical, that acne was the single greatest cause of neurosis in teenagers, but I haven’t inquired if that’s in comparison with having been beaten or molested, or demeaned habitually, but now I look at the pitted and scarred faces of adults with keen interest, consider their teenaged years, and picture them withering from the shitty glances of snotty kids in the popular or fast crowds. Their acne humiliates them as they skulk from class to class in the hollow halls of high school, anxious corridors in most Americans’ histories. My dermatologist, whose skin is unblemished and who is also an oncologist, can tell at a glance, having looked for years at many varieties of skin problems, though he’s particularly sensitive to a young person’s outbreaks, if a mole is cancerous, and I have wondered how he feels when he spots a mark that could be fatal, or how he would proceed if at gatherings where people who aren’t his patients come into view, he notices, without thinking, an abnormal mole on a neck or cheek, and, if he or any doctor, like an off-duty cop, would be required ethically or as professionals to act. I like my dermatologist and have a good relationship with him. I am not sure what a good relationship with a doctor means, except that people want to be taken care of and be cared for, and that it can occur with a professional, with a modicum of goodwill, even with a cosmetologist, like the Polish woman who has given me facials for years, but whom my dermatologist doesn’t know, though they both care for my skin, but I trust him not to damage me, so that might make a good relationship. It was he who years ago cautioned me about the deadly effects of the sun, prescribing sun blocks and offering me samples of protective lotions, and told me never to go out in the sun without protecting my skin, to wear lotion or a hat, preferably both. I rarely wear hats, because I look silly or bad in them and, even if wearing a hat meant saving my life, I might not, in company especially, because I’m vain, just as I don’t go into the ocean, though I love the beach and the ocean more than many sights, places, and people I go to regularly, because I would have to expose too much of my body, not just to the virulent rays of the sun, though that is always a danger, but also to society’s gaze, which is immediately worse, though I am not apanthropic, since my attachment to solitude is divided, and have an erratic aversion to human society, whose opinion matters less the longer I am here and the older I become, so that, when I approach death, it might be a matter of indifference whom I leave behind, since I won’t care about living or dying, though my mother’s longevity indicates I might be here longer than I can stand. My dermatologist is cautious; he does not want to scar my skin when he performs a procedure. It is possible he has noticed the cherry birthmark on the back of my thigh, but he’s never mentioned it. If I had one on my face, if it covered half of my face as I’ve seen on other people, my dermatologist and I would talk about it frequently and doubtless he would suggest methods and means, if they were available, to handle or ameliorate its effects.

  THE BRAND OF JEANS THAT the odd inquisitive woman wears could have meaning, since everything means something, even if it is not anything much, negligible, or hardly worth mentioning, and, even though interpretations change and often meanings are temporary, especially those about a brand, her jeans still affect my relationship to her, since much harbors in trivialities, though not as much as in profound words and acts, whose significance can also be debated and more likely is. It was the second time I had seen her, a stranger, and both times she’d been presumptuous and provocative, calling attention to her ability to see through me. She had given advice and asked questions, and she had made warnings of a sort, like a sibyl, so I would remember her words, even if I didn’t want to. Yet little of what I want may be remembered, and what is, is memorialized, since each of us builds an altar to our memory with tokens and objects set on it, since memory distinguishes humans from though some animals appear to remember, and my favorite stories are about cats and dogs who have lost their way or been abandoned and who have traveled hundreds of miles to find their way home, even when they weren’t wanted, though sometimes they were, and, without a map or a way of asking questions, they have returned.

  It was when my dog found her way after having been lost in the woods that my father’s resistance to her, since at first he didn’t like her, because he didn’t like dogs and she was pregnant, transformed into something approximating love,
and I too have had the same experience about a cat I didn’t like that was, nonetheless, mine. The idea that the cat might fall out a window and would not be, as he usually was, hiding behind the refrigerator, pricked me, since I’d left my window wide open, I realized later at the library, and the diffidence I felt toward the difficult, troubled cat turned into affection, at least for a time, when I found him safe, concealed behind the refrigerator. Later, he went mad and attacked me, leaving four indentations on my left calf. When my father began to love my new dog, it was Christmastime. We were on vacation, my brother had already left us, the dog might have been a substitute for my brother, a present or companion, life offers a plethora of substitutions, since I was an only child now or their substitute son, but still I didn’t go into my father’s business. It had been snowing for days and days, and a magical terrain lay before my happily startled eyes. The dog and my father marched into the woods once we were settled into our rustic cottage in the mountains, snow everywhere and more of it falling, and, while walking, the short-legged, long-tailed tawny dog was swallowed by winter’s heavy coat, and soon my father lost her, but to his credit, though he doesn’t deserve much in regard to the dog, he looked for her for an hour. Not finding her and having become cold, he returned to his room, where the dog sat at the door, so glad to see my father, her tail whipped in gleeful circles, and my father now loved the dog he decided was smart as well as loyal. But this love was disastrously short-lived. Everyone has a tale about an animal’s devotion that exceeds reason, the loyalty demonstrated by it and its heroic acts. People love their animals because their animals love them, they say, in ways no one else would, without carping judgments, and animals help the sick and elderly, they know not to hurt small children, except my deranged cat, who couldn’t make distinctions, and after a while, no one could enter the house for fear of the cat’s attack, but in many ways I didn’t mind, since I don’t want people to come to my house, to see what I have on my shelves or my walls, to make judgments, which are necessarily inadequate, since what I think I am, unlike an animal’s love and undying loyalty, is impossible to display. But then this is a notion, disposition, habit of mind, or humor I’m working to disinhabit or more completely inhabit, an understanding of which I’d like to accomplish here, to discover its validity or lack, and in the room that is not for sleeping, where I light fires and watch them, my ideas or objects lie strewn over the floor, and I mean to do something with them in this regard.

  If I can imagine it, I often ask myself, does it need to happen or be accomplished, and do I need to realize it, since fantasies impress upon the senses as much if not more than actualities. I’m in a room in the clapboard hotel near the edge of town, an airy old building, where it’s cold inside, and the kitchen helper has sneaked up the stairs, though the reception area is cheerfully free of guards, and in the bedroom, with its inviting white comforter, he and I undress. His skin pleases me, since it doesn’t yet show the stress and weight of life, except in a few patches where he’d bruised or scratched himself, with a scar or two, the one beneath his chin endemic to kids who ride bikes, but caressing his skin is touching a new velvet, he’s almost hairless, like a newt, even more naked in the frigid room, since nakedness never is familiar entirely, not to me, anyway, because the body has its own legislation, yet it’s also legislated by individuals, families, governments, and religions who spend a lot of time conspiring to restrict and limit its disorderliness, which attests to nothing being natural in the way human beings use the term, because what could be more natural than a body’s excretions, secretions, farts, noises, and hungers that are restrained and suppressed most everywhere. Though many women, like a few in residence, starve themselves and pretend, especially the psoriatic one, to the point of fainting, that they are not hungry, when they are more hungry and have greater appetite than many others, even those who eat and eat and are still not satisfied. Anorexics look hungry, have poor complexions, and are cloying dinner partners, since they refuse to admit their condition as they inflict it upon others in sly, petulant doses, and sitting next to the disconsolate woman at dinner as she haughtily denied herself, cherishing how little she ate and how much everyone else had, is inhibitory. Inhibition is contagious, especially in its righteous versions. Anorexics spend most of their time hiding, especially their bodies, most curiously wearing layer upon layer of clothes to appear heavier than they are, when they want to be perceived as thin, since they know that exposure reveals their fleshless, skeletal bodies, and so they conceal them. Also they are as cold as corpses.

  His erection might have been for anyone, democratically hot and hard, and I felt a palpable reversal of positions, for when I was his age I sometimes lay with men many years older, who were supposed to teach me something, as if we were in France, and mostly I wasn’t taught—the most unappetizing sex I ever had was with a Frenchman—and the older men were meant to be gentle, but most weren’t, only one or two, and, since I was free, supposedly, and strong, even if just a girl in school, who supposedly knew what she wanted, who spoke well and read seriously, it was assumed I could do what I wanted and be what I hoped for, so then I could and should pursue pleasure, part of my birthright, though as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of American women in the 19th century, it was that lone, unique freedom which damned them to unhappy marriages. The American social order, he theorized, was different from the European model, where a society that arranged marriages, which performed the social and economic work they were contracted to do, permitted and expected infidelities, and because they were not manufactured by love, these sensible, loveless marriages granted the partners ex-officio pleasures. But a free American woman, at liberty to choose a love match, paid the highest price. I have made choices, I have loved freely in some way, as I did little Johnny and others, and I have recollections of my lovers, or have retained knowledge of their smell and some unimportant habits. I have left men and been left by them, I have been cruel and made promises lightly, said I would return and didn’t, and this is insignificant now except for inevitable remorse. In seclusion, when I honestly compare myself or try to distinguish myself from animals whose love is assumed to be indiscriminate, I apprehend my capacity to love both differently and similarly, since after its demise, I often don’t remember the lover, can’t comprehend why I had desired the object of my temporary affection, and can’t recognize myself in the match. Also memory revamps itself. The temporary is contemporary, flowing in the veins, though humans behave as if permanence beat steadily in every transaction and feeling, in imaginary edifices of lifelong connection, inspired and conceived to deny their limited lifespans. Some love lasts, though. My mother and father were tethered to each other, my mother loved my father more than anyone, my father adored his brother, he didn’t give my mother the kind of love she wanted, as her mother and father, whom she never mentions, didn’t, so she couldn’t know how to love, but then she may have received from her husband what she wanted, since love is perverse and enjoys its opposite, to which it reverts most conveniently. I never understood my father, his sadness and rages, I saw his joy and hope, and his humiliation, too, and when my brother vanished and his brother died, something left my father never to return. My brother might have broken my father’s heart and contributed to his death. I should have taken over the business, yet when I was young, I didn’t want to, but there is no business now, and also my father taught me too little about it, it wouldn’t be the same, anyway, though I can imagine starting over in the American way. One morning, when I was caring for my mother, while she was eating a breakfast of loosely scrambled eggs and a lightly toasted English muffin, which she liked if it was soft enough, though her appetite was erratic, she was lucid. Looking at me, my mother said, “Your father was a very good lover.” Stunned, I kept silent, and then my mother peered across the table at the windows to an unimpeded view of the city that included my favorite monument, the Empire State Building, which was constructed in sixteen months during the Great Depression that my mother and father liv
ed through.

  THE KITCHEN HELPER MAY BE unique to my experience, which recently I have understood as what I have had and own but also don’t have and can’t own, except that somehow it may add up to what I am. With him, in the sense I was, I pulsed with amorousness and stealth, but an experience is fleet footed and is always something in passing, whether it’s profound or not, and still, I had categories of feeling for and comprehension about the event and because of that I could set it and him within these temporalities, while I hovered sensually and mentally over, in, and out of myself. In this and other passing moments, I looked for lessons in everything and everywhere. I had always learned lessons fast if not commandingly, I itched to know it all, when it seemed easy to learn, when nothing was barred from entry, and, later, implanted ideas threatened to oppose alternatives, which is when, if a deliberate excavation doesn’t begin, the mind clamps down and shuts. As a child, I wanted to run along, not be bothered by anyone, feared quitting or failing, and also people I perceived as static, who carried immobility in them. I wanted to move, had to keep moving, or I’d die. Without realizing it, I was an American, I didn’t know the specifics then, only embodying and enacting them, while I ran along the track of my formal and informal lessons, skipping over cracks, and I didn’t see what I didn’t want and shed ideas like a snake does dead skin. While I craved attention, I believed that my machinations—and I—were profoundly invisible, and often I sat in the corner of a schoolroom holding firm the theory that I was unseen because what I thought was invisible. Experience and neurosis are temporal and local, as it was for those young female patients of my dermatologist who had suffered from purpura, a skin disease that is no longer a current medical problem but whose causes might return in other forms and with other symptoms. Some Chinese develop pa-feng, a fear of wind and cold; in Malaysia and Indonesia, there is latah, a psychosis that leads to an uncontrollable mimicking of other people. The kitchen helper may also not be unique but an imitation, or derivative, but my pondering of unforeseeable consequences, questionable acts and chaotic decisions, with remorse and regret accompanying them, is not good for my progress, though I don’t really believe in progress, only change, which is also rare.