American Genius

by Lynne Tillman

  IN THE BEGINNING, WHEN JUST being alive was magical, with sleights of whimsy I could ward off the evil eye and recede into what I told myself was true. I winged like a hummingbird at a feeder, nurtured by assuming singular flighty poses, and it was easy to please people, especially by dissembling. I pleased little Johnny by paying attention to how he stood, distressed, behind an oak tree, and I could please myself and the kitchen helper, I could buy the Prouvé chair, too, but being pleasing isn’t always pleasant, and sex sometimes isn’t, which is what I discussed later with the Turkish resident, since he was interested in having more sex in everything, as he insisted daily, though I wasn’t sure why, since I wanted not to be wanting, though I couldn’t divorce myself from lust and its sensorium of treacheries.

  The kitchen helper’s grandmother had worked in a mill nearby and his great-great-grandfather carved rough-hewn furniture and lost an arm to a lathe. His grandfather was a foreman in a cotton mill, so I told him cotton textiles was the key industry early in the Industrial Revolution, that John Kay’s flying shuttle in 1733, James Hargreaves spinning jenny, patented in 1770, Richard Arkwright’s spinning frame, in 1769, Samuel Crompton’s mule in 1779, and Edmund Cartwright’s power loom, patented in 1783, facilitated an incredible increase in production. Then I told him I wanted the Prouvé chair from the café, which made him laugh, he’d never even noticed it, and I went on about the early 19th century, before the Industrial Revolution was in full gear in America, explaining it was then that the first attempts had been made to shift the chair from a crafted good to a designed product. We were in the health food store, he talked about organic chocolate, I had imitated my first American history teacher, Tucker, for him right in front of the jumbo Medjool dates. When I taught American history, I modeled myself after Mr. Tucker, I explained. Dates, fat and sweet, “those dates, they are like sex,” the Turkish poet teased later, “and, you see, dear, they’re called sweetmeats for something.”

  WALKING BACK, FOLLOWING THE SAME route with the plain exception that I avoided the waterfall, which almost disappears when it is past dusk, as it is now, a plaintive time, though if you were to walk beside the water, you could hear the falls’ pulsating roars—not like a lion’s—I wish I’d brought a flashlight, to light up the rushing waters. Even the woods have receded into an exquisitely quiet evening, while the blacktop road is illuminated only when a car appears, spotlighting the white line running down the middle of it. I was afraid, yet there was nothing to fear except freak accidents. The large, friendly dog who sits in front of its master’s white, shingled house ran toward me to say hello the way he always does when he sees me or anyone, he’s bigger than my dog, who was killed by my parents and whose life I should have saved. I walked in the dark and hummed, I tossed about internally, I stretched my legs, I swung my arms, and I thought and didn’t think. No one was around. I crossed a tricky intersection and, worse, rounded a dangerous bend where a drunken driver could careen off the road and kill me but didn’t, and by then I was approaching the compound, with its several beaming lampposts, and relaxed, since now I didn’t expect an accident. I could enter the main house and check in with the attendant, but I might meet someone whose presence might ruffle my fur or serve up an obstacle as sticky as a jelly apple, or who, upon closer acquaintance, might become a friend or an enemy. Mostly I have been able to avoid the intimacy and wrath of the residents by maintaining a distant or cordial restraint in conversation, but each day my posture loses its rigor, so my pose is dropping, since I am off guard more often than I know, and surely I will be challenged, since people come and go, not long ago, the partners, Henry, who’s supposedly white like me, when actually my skin has a yellow cast, because of Mongolian ancestors, and Arthur, who’s supposedly black but nothing like the nighttime forest when I walked past it. The pair arrived with their secret plans, spend time freely, even lavishly, especially with the Turkish poet, and they might challenge me. More newcomers will have arrived today, to become our dinner companions, clustering expectantly beforehand in the lounge or social zone, where everyone gathers to discuss their day and the news, and where each of us habitually asserts similarity or difference from the others, so I forestall this commonplace adventure and walk on, because I might yet get something done. There might be time to have a bath, too.

  Some embers are still glowing in the flagstone fireplace when I return, but it is no miracle, one log smolders, ash white or red like a rare charcoal-broiled steak, heat and smoke rising from it, so then I feed it again, as if giving my wild cat a treat, and watch it for a while, to decipher a rhythm to its movements, like a song’s on the radio, but there is none. I poke it twice more and remember the Count, who might now be awakening for his breakfast, and recollecting him provides a peaceful sensation, after so much restlessness, thrill, and agitation, and then I turn on the radio to hear an actual song, but I don’t like anything, since the beat isn’t mine. The Count is the bohemian scion of an early Virginia family whose money came from a land grant, they had grown cotton, the cash crop of the South, on their vast holding, a plantation, dependent on the labor of enslaved African men and women, and later during Reconstruction and still later in Jim Crow times, they’d invested well and opened first one, then another bank, which was in turn absorbed in bigger corporations, from which the Count still benefits. By now his inheritance had a history he couldn’t deny but wanted to, and, when it was known, he was chagrined by it, so he rarely mentioned his family, except he must have to Contesa, in Paris, since she had inherited the South, also, and I sometimes marveled that some of her ancestors might have worked his ancestors’ land before their emancipation. His family never spoke of him, when, after a Princeton education, the Ivy League university best suited for a Southern gentleman, where he excelled, he’d escaped to Paris, where he also excelled in idleness and dabbled in available and some esoteric vices, until his body rebelled and, like Samuel Beckett, whom he also knew, boils formed between his penis and his rectum, violent headaches threw him onto his bed for days, so he took one drug after another to quell the pain. Then, one day walking along the Seine, he was stopped dead by a beautiful clock, small, with a blue enamel face, and it was then that he discovered time’s equipment and wanted to live if only to collect it, and his pain left him. The majority of his collection of precious and unique clocks and watches, timepieces so fine museums vied for them, were kept secure, locked in his bedroom, lined with fire-resistant materials, far from here, and those specimens were never seen, not even by his closest friends. Even when absent, with the assistance of his employees, the Count assured their excellent care. Close or far, he was enthralled by their mechanics, age, fragility, the fact that they went on, as he did, would go on and on, if preserved well, as he wouldn’t, and once he showed me his pocketwatch that to an untrained eye such as mine didn’t appear special but was. This, the Count avidly informed me, was designed by Abraham-Louis Breguet in 1795, in Paris, and signed “Breguet et fils.” It was gold with a mechanism invented by Breguet to adjust for a pocketwatch’s generally not keeping good time, as it is constantly being moved and held in different positions. With great cleverness, Breguet mounted the escapement; I asked the Count to define escapement: a device in a timepiece which controls the motion of the train of wheelwork and through which the energy of the power source is delivered to the pendulum. Breguet mounted it to balance on a small carriage that averaged out the errors by rotating at regular intervals, “just a marvel,” the Count remarked with delight, studying its simple gold face, its delicate roman numerals, its secondary dial for counting seconds and which, like a small moon, was positioned at noon or midnight. Because of its revolving motion, the device is called a tourbillon, a whirlwind. “This is Breguet’s invention,” the Count repeated to underscore with awe the Frenchman’s achievement. Breguet was unrivaled during his time and patronized by Louis XVI and Napoleon.

  —Its face looks modern, I said.

  —It’s a classic, I shouldn’t wear it, it’s wrong, but
I can’t resist. It’s my one vice.

  —Really?

  —Did you notice that its hands are midnight blue? he asked evasively.

  In his way, the Count, who loved timepieces, and whose addiction to them obliterated his pain, turned night into day, designing an existence that also escaped regular time’s exigencies. Time itself was a fox—his progenitors had hunted fox—an agony for him, but like a wily mistress, he paid for and kept it, knowing he couldn’t subdue it, but punctuality was essential, and he accumulated its objects, and so, in a sense, he collected time, it was a sweet illusion, though he was no fool, less foolish than I was during this time in my life, when I was brought together with him and others, residing with them, when it was expected—I expected it on the prognosis of the card reader—that a great obstacle would be confronted and a magnificent change effected in me. There is usually interference or an obstacle, small or large, as there was even during the card reading, when a headache pulsed above my eye, so I found it difficult to concentrate, the stiff deck was nearly impossible to shuffle, but once I split it in half, as the prognosticator or reader dictated, while dogs barked outside and my young cat followed the shadows he made when he arranged the cards, it was primarily his hands and lopsided mouth I watched.

  After that, I no longer was permitted to touch the cards, and about them he repeated several times, They’re in the past. Some think that the page represents a female, but we don’t know, and this—he exclaimed—is like a love letter, the page is carrying a love letter, he or she is a student or messenger of some kind, this is the page of hearts; he’s carrying a cup, but it’s generally thought to be a love letter. With another card beside it, since context is important, it could mean a pregnancy, he explained. When the king of the suit wants to get something done, he sends the knight. One of my cards was the knight of coins, the tarot reader said, he’s a hard worker, he’s stable, dependable—like a Ulysses S. Grant, he won the war, gets the job done but he’s not long on style—the page has style, but not the knight. It’s an emotional card. The card of the hearts—and you’ve got a work card, it’s a good balance of work and love. The middle row is the present and the middle card tends to represent you, and this is, he said, happily, a great card, it’s literally the whole world, the world is your oyster, the world is good, it’s not the political world, and, look, here’s the sun, it’s beneficence and good fortune. Nothing can go wrong here—this is the brain. You have the Queen of Coins, the highest female figure, very capable. Coins are money, money is a token, you move money around and your world moves, coins became pentacles, but they’re money, worldly capability, and she’s the Queen Bee. You have hearts and coins, there’s only one of the swords, and mostly they’re bad because they’re tricky, but you have only one of them, a good one at that, but if you had two, it could turn the whole table and the reading.

  He grimaced at the cards.

  There was also a page and a knight, I recall now, they were in the past or maybe the present. The reader was staring at the cards the way my dermatologist does my skin. In the present and the future, you have hearts and coins, he explained, money and love, and one of the swords, you’ve got the best one, because they’re more mental. Mostly they’re bad because they’re tricky, since the brain turns into anxiety or viciousness, treacherous in the extreme, but you have a very good one at that.

  He tapped my head twice. But if you had two, it could turn the whole table and the reading. I liked having my head tapped. Then he saw an obstacle and commented, reassuringly, that because I had the best mental card, I would know when to stop. But then he stopped the card reading. I am not sure I know when to stop, but that may be the most important thing to know: When to stop sleeping, when to stop eating, when to stop exercising, when to stop crying, when to stop talking, when to stop a friendship, a romance, when to stop trying, when to stop having hope, when to stop waiting, when to stop.

  ALL MY LIFE, I’VE BEEN stealing fire, it is a persistent image, and, as the fire before me raises its red head, a welter of phantasmal shapes leap and roll, dance like the tarot card reader’s hands, and with them the words Stealing Fire—in blue script—flicker overhead. The kitchen helper is figuratively inside me. It is impossible to steal fire, but I hope to steal what can’t be robbed, like love, devotion, purpose, because then I wouldn’t have to return it. Isaac was Abraham’s son, and his throat was almost cut, with a fire nearby, until God relented and allowed Abraham to sacrifice a sheep instead, in honor of which sheep are slaughtered in Morocco every year, commemorating God’s compassion. If Abraham had murdered his son, he would have obeyed arbitrary commands, as Job did, to confirm his faith in God, but Job isn’t celebrated, though his churlish arguments with God nag at faith and free will, and he was the Bible’s antihero. I suppose my father might have sacrificed his son to his business, or that’s what my brother feared and ran from, it’s an interpretation. I became a son by default, a mimicry that probably failed, and studied American history to make sense of the past, any past that wasn’t entirely mine or of my own design, I believe it was my remedy or rationale, though it’s not what I thought then. Now history assures me no longer of sense and reason but of the human effort to document and legitimize its humanity, its triumphs, laws, flaws, to make legible what is incoherent, to remember a past that might help people in the present—a persistent belief that is rarely ever justified. I know the difference between right and wrong, yet I am always stealing fire, and now my outstretched left hand scoops the air above the wanton, undulating flames, as they leap out of reach, impossible to catch and control, like a body that recoils from constriction. And like a human being, a fire dies, especially when it’s not tended, but it could do the opposite and spread rapaciously about the room, but then certainly I ‘d notice it, because the heat would be overpowering, and I ‘d sense it. If I didn’t, I couldn’t escape, I could be badly burned or suffer grotesque disfiguration, then require costly and repeated surgeries to return my face to normal, though normality is relative, but undoubtedly never again to be pretty or even attractive. I don’t want to be scarred or grossly disfigured, but I feel a compulsion to look at the fire-scarred faces of strangers in the street, whose skin is stretched tautly across their faces, covering it like enemy territory.

  I have walked, at home, near a transvestite whose facial skin is like mottled rubber, and I have often witnessed her chatting with neighborhood people who by now don’t appear to notice how she looks, but I couldn’t forget the distress her face connotes, like a memoir written by a survivor, even if we were friends for many years, which would be impossible. I couldn’t be friends with her, since I could never forget how badly scarred her face was, how her uneven eye makeup dripped down her face in garish streaks and marked her rubbery cheeks, or how her lips drooped and her lipstick smeared onto her pocked chin. Sometimes her hair, amplified or enhanced with a wig of peculiar material, is pulled up and piled in a bun near the front of her head, matted and about to topple over onto her forehead, and, as she thrusts her rippled chin forward in apparent defiance, crossing the street, her massive bun moves, too, and threatens to fall onto her rouged cheeks. Rouge streaks her nose and chin also, and if there is deliberateness, which there appears to be, the effect she has in mind and has designed is inaccessible to me, though Adolf Loos believed the origin of fine art was “the urge to decorate one’s face,” so in her haphazard application of rouge may lie artfulness. The Zulu say, Ngiyakubona kalukhuni, which means, I see you with difficulty. In the city where I walk past her and in which we reside together separately, my lunch is not carried to me in a paper bag and I do not dump it, like tomato soup with cold spaghetti, into the toilet bowl. I once threw grapefruit peels into a city toilet, which immediately overflowed, and I suppressed a scream as the water poured over the seat onto the floor of the place I was renting, but I never threw any other food into a toilet in the city. The Count, to whom I cautiously mentioned my fear of overflowing toilets, when we were in the main house before
dinner discussing the creative impulse, was wry and elegant, with an exceptional horse face, eyes like black jet, and tiny pits dotting his face, remnants of adolescent acne, especially on his high cheekbones that were like flying buttresses, I thought, his winged victory. He was a handsome man or stately, and, during this period, when I was far from people I knew well whom I could trust even moderately, I sometimes felt I had all the time in the world, that time was abundant, another sweet illusion, but his presence, whenever I was near him, established its passage. Of all who were in residence during this sojourn, when something might occur that could change my life, though I also doubted it, it was to him I expected to speak about chairs, my aging mother, American and other history, my dead father, my sensitive skin, friends and enemies, maybe even the Polish woman, how she cared for me, how I depended upon her being alien and close, too, as in most intimate encounters with strangers like her. Immediately he had struck me as a person who could listen. His wife, whom he mentioned the first night, but never again, flourished as a fantasy, and she might have been Polish, like the beautician, off with a lover, or had abandoned the Count because of his devotion to clocks over which she had no power or control, and he had none, either. To distract himself, or as an amusement, he was learning Sanskrit, during, I supposed, the long nights that were his days, while I was, I said to him, unmaking stuff, sketching chairs, and haphazardly studying Zulu, but I was no good at picking up foreign tongues. In the town antique store and book outlet, I had acquired a Zulu manual for beginners, with exercises, published in 1960, and toyed with mastering a language no one I knew could speak, not as yet anyway, though mastery is a residual, even fugitive idea, and Zulu I believe may be more complex than other languages to which my native language is related, because it likes to join words together; still, no one I knew could test me on it. It might have been then that the Count, my timekeeper, decided to befriend me, while simultaneously embracing the tall balding man, who was increasingly suspicious of me, since he knew I observed him and the disconsolate woman flirt, as she pushed her food around on her plate and eyed him with limpid hunger. It also may have been shortly afterward, when I recited to the Count, in beginner’s Zulu, “The lion slept in the east,” ibubesi (lion) impumalanga (east), an image I found beautiful and had no reason ever to say in English, that he taught me the best way to start a fire. “It is lucky,” he remarked in his droll way, “that you don’t suffer from pyrophobia, because this would be the wrong community for you.” Later, as we watched a fire he had built, he told me that the poet Rumi started the whirling dervishes, the real ones, and that he saw them dance in southern Turkey, but that was a long time ago.