American Genius

by Lynne Tillman

  In the place where I was raised, there was much ordinary obscenity, many girls disliked their faces, especially their noses, and had their noses broken and surgically fixed when they were teenagers. They were bandaged for weeks. I was invited to visit a friend whose nose had been surgically broken and fixed, who had just come out of the hospital and was lying in bed, having a party for her new self and newly straightened nose. It was attended by her friends, of which I was one, though I was much closer to her cousin, who died not long before in a car accident, a traumatic event that changed my life, though there is no visible scar covering it. This girl lay in bed, bandaged and bruised, and happy, though her eyes were bloodshot, black and blue, and her face was swollen, and her skin a fabric of purple blotches. I sat at the edge of her bed, which was covered with a fluffy white comforter, surrounded by her other friends, and looked at this girl’s swollen face and blood-streaked, black-and-blue eyes. I turned green, I was informed later, in a disparaging way, and fled the room, raced down the stairs, to the front lawn, which was covered in a fresh, light snow, and fell upon it and fainted. For a while, I rested in the snow, cold, relieved, dizzily unattended by my friends, not caring then that they may have thought I’d been insensitive to the girl with the purple, swollen face. But I was never again invited to such an event in a place where girls regularly had their noses broken, straightened, and thinned, because they saw their noses and themselves as imperfect and ugly, inadequate, in part because of the religion into which they were born, whose clannishness produced certain facial characteristics, which they wanted to abolish while remaining tribal, though they wanted also to be accepted into the larger society by looking more like it.

  AN ACCUMULATION OF NEWSPAPER AND magazine clippings, photos of chairs, boxes of loose papers, objects, postcards and letters, yellow pads with doodles, notes toward serious projects, such as my essay on the futility of strict constructionist readings of the Constitution, various sketches and designs, lists for lifetime affairs, favorite quotations, my archive of forgotten and failed ideas, and a number of small paper and wood constructions, which lacked necessity or conclusiveness, clutter my room. I often move in my chair, restless on the seat, most chairs don’t satisfy, chairs send messages about attitudes and values, their designer’s character, too. A chair is an idea. I shift and squirm, because my skin itches on another’s idea, since ideas can be uncomfortable. Shakespeare’s line, “a Barber’s chaire that fits all buttocks,” amuses me, and I conjure an image of a bawdy chair, which I haven’t ever seen, and a lap, to suit Samuel Johnson’s “Mistaking a lady’s lap for my own chair.” I might sit upon a lap of carnal disaster, or I have, or I might be that lap for another. I can leave a chair but not the past, I like chairs, I like history, not my past particularly, because I’m wedded to it, there is never a respite. I can fly away from a chair, while my mother can barely rise from hers, what I take for granted takes every ounce of her will, concentration, and energy, but it’s nothing for me to rise from a chair, I can rise over and over, and at her age and in her condition, she can’t. I also can forget and even dismiss what I look like, because I don’t really want to live in my body or in the past, even if I do, which is against my will or without my knowledge or approval, since about most things I don’t have a choice. I’m compelled to trust in imagination, it may offer, when it presents itself, something like choice, even though Shelley wrote, the Count says, “we have lost our ability to imagine.” But ingenious chair design disproves the poet and also the Count, unless he wouldn’t consider design imaginative, and many don’t because of its attachment to function, but then imagination itself as well as creativity may be attached to the human function, and they have been discredited, since overvalued and extravagantly praised, they fell from grace, and also because they spring from what can’t be known, reasoned with, or controlled, the unconscious, a force of nature like that the 18th century named “genius.” Of the Moderns, the Count preferred the Romantic poets, though he also liked William Burroughs and Jean Genet, but not nearly as much as the Sumerians and Greeks, and once reminisced about his memorable warrior summer of ’68, recalling it with Wordsworth’s phrase: the “perishable hours of life.” Chairs don’t perish in that sense, design doesn’t either, history may, I think it may, I worry that it does, I’m not sure what happens when we forget to remember. Languages carry a history, which is often forgotten, but which also communicates itself in every word.

  The Zulu alphabet contains the same letters as the English, and in English the word “Zulu” is mostly deployed descriptively and with prejudice. A Zulu is a member of the Bantu people mainly inhabiting Zululand and Natal in South Africa. The Zulus, since the 19th century, have been noted for their fiercely patriarchal social organization and aggressive defense of territory, first against the Boers in 1838 and subsequently against the British in the Zulu Wars of 1879–1897. The Zulu noun a-ba-ntu means men or people, but in the Zulu language there are few short words, while there are many in English. My first introduction to Zulu was: “Don’t behave like a Zulu,” which was said to me by a teacher when I was seven, so I asked my mother what Zulu was, and she told me to look it up in the dictionary, where I learned it was a derogatory term for a black person in the U.S. At that time the only black people I knew were the women who worked in our house, the boy I roller-skated with sometimes, and Junior, who worked for my father and my uncle. A Zulu hat is a kind of straw hat with a wide brim, which I might wear under a hot sun, if I were alone, and astronomers often keep track of events according to standard solar time that corresponds to the Greenwich time zone. This is called G.M.T. (Greenwich Mean Time), U.T. (Universal Time), or Z (which is colloquially called Zulu Time). I want to ask the Count about Z Time.

  I DRAG TWO CARDBOARD BOXES close to the fire, stare at the ordinary dock on the mantelpiece, and think: There is time, I can burn some of it, my clutter, and still have a bath. The fire is very excited, jumping and waving, and its heat arouses the wrath of my sensitive skin, so slowly I turn in the direction of the boxes and lift a yellowed news clipping, a veterinarian’s obituary notice, she’d devoted her life to capturing and sheltering abandoned and feral cats, a life I also should lead, and feed it to the wood fire, which solicits more flame and heat. My mother adopted our exceptional family cat when I was three years old, the kitten was six weeks old, and soon, with no knowledge of the ways of cats, I taught her to beg, crawl, and roll over. The cat agreed to learn the tricks to humor me, she never scratched me, she complied, uncatlike. She also hunted mice in the woods and brought them regularly to my mother; she let herself out of the house by pushing against the screen door or leaping up to the handle and turning it with her body, and she followed my mother on her visits to friends’ and neighbors’ houses, where she waited outside until my mother emerged, or the cat walked into town behind my mother, accompanying her like a dog. She was devoted to my mother, who later gave her away and had her killed, but my mother remembers only the story she wrote about the cat’s endearing traits and marvelous antics and how the cat played with me, her baby, and how much I loved the cat, and she always mentions the cat’s devotion to her.

  Mechanically, without reading the next yellowed clipping, feeling impetuous, since who knows what will be lost, I toss it into the fire’s greedy mouth. A sheet of newspaper immolates what might have been meaningful at a certain time in my life and which I’d wanted to keep for research, some scrap of information I might need for the future, whose coming I wasn’t interested in unless it was close, unless there was a freak event that stopped me from engaging with it, is destroyed. I feel about its disposal as I do many things, including friendships and ideas I’d once held dear but was later able to shunt off or metaphorically incinerate, and this capacity casts suspicion on what I currently regard as important. But I don’t destroy photographs. Burning sheets of paper, drawings, clippings, the detrita stored to spark consciousness, relieves me, since I am unburdening myself of the past, which includes more than I can remembe
r, but some of it I try consciously to leave behind, though I fear discarding anything, since I’m not sure finally what will be significant, and in this way I lose history.

  In one year, three people inimical to me died, so my patch of territory opened up, I breathed more fully when I walked around in it, knowing I couldn’t meet them, and though I didn’t wish death on them and hadn’t ever considered it, since I never thought of them except when they screeched into view like two cars crashing, my three putative enemies uncannily died in the same year within months of each other. Ever since, this fact, for it is, has held a perverse satisfaction and terror for me, and I have recalled my unimportant enemies more than I did when they were alive, since death keeps its own accounts, including those labeled coincident fates. They might have been or become obstacles to me, though I don’t believe their interests or fates were sufficiently entwined in mine to have made them the obstacles the tarot reader addressed. In an obituary notice, one was cited for his charitable work. Another, before her untimely demise at forty-three, was caught redhanded embezzling from her mother, who was under her care, though she had previously married a damaged, aggressive man who assaulted her and so she was pitied. The third was distinguished by his not being particularly bad or good, yet each, at a certain time and in a specific manner, had disturbed my peace of mind.

  A cardboard angel drops out of a notebook, a memento from a scholarly Irishwoman who befriended me in London, when I was there for two months, and who told me, one chilly afternoon, of her boredom with life. I was too young, without experience, I didn’t understand her meaning, but now I think I do. Her mind instantly mandated the establishment of a foreign country, which I wanted to visit, she studied angels, but I refrained from asking too many questions and imposing on her time, and anyway I might not have been able to understand her or her belief in angels. Here, this morning, a blond-haired girl from Oklahoma rushed past me, brushing against my body nervously, even aggressively, as I walked toward the dining room, and this has happened especially when she has noticed that I have mail, and she doesn’t. She has been here longer than I, we have never spoken, she is usually at the women’s table, an informal congregation that takes shape from time to time, as does a men’s table. Occasionally I decide I will inquire about her, delve into a relationship, but as she brushes past me, in the manner she did this morning before I entered the dining room, when I then rushed past the disconsolate women to the kitchen, I am confirmed in my decision not to engage her. I know only that she has a number of allergies to unlikely foods and has caused the head cook consternation. If I had lived in the scholar’s Ireland, in the early part of the 20th century, I would have a troubled relationship to God, with sin, not to poetry but to politics, and, I imagine, irritated nipples rubbed raw from the starched white sheets on beds in cold bedrooms. In her Ireland, I sit on a stiff, horsehair-covered chair near the fire, watching her long, wavy blond hair as it drops onto the back of a chair, where, with scissors shaped like angel’s wings, she clips pictures of angels and cherubs from one book and pastes them into another. On those chilly days, by artificial fires or electric heaters in London, she told me about chilblains, and, because my skin is sensitive, I was prone to them, or vulnerable, and usually I sat near the fire with my hands and arms over my forelegs to shield them. Then my hands became chapped and red like hers and many Irish and English people’s.

  Many English people, with whose country America has a lasting and broken kinship, once had red, chapped hands from sitting in front of electric fires, many still resist central heating, and believe a cold room is good for them, though mostly they aren’t Puritans. I like watching a fire, not an electric fire, which doesn’t change, and I like watching TV, which changes and doesn’t change, like a fire changes and stays the same, a recognizable blur of blue, purple, yellow, orange, and red flames, to my mind also numbers, leaping about, borrowing evanescent shapes, and with just a sheet of newspaper tossed casually onto it, roars approval and grows bigger and bigger. It can also become boring and dull, the way anything can, especially when you get older, mature and still dependent on the people you love and hate, and increasingly on novelty and surprise. So I like to make the fire grow, to make it huge and magnificent, to have it consume everything, and feed it like a child, nourishing it until I lose interest, which I shouldn’t if it were a child, but my fear is that the fire will get out of hand and take over, overwhelm me, which is probably also what I want, an insane desire. A magnificent erection shown to me and for me in its first glory is moving and overwhelming, an obvious sign of pleasure, one that cannot be missed or obscured, though its source can be misunderstood, like imagining its hardness is for you alone when in fact it could be for anyone. A fire is always the same and yet different and could become uncontrollable, like the kitchen helper, were I to fan his flame and our nascent fantasy, since he is of scant reality to me, even though he is a daily piece in it. I like burning things, I like undoing and unmaking things, nowadays I take apart what I put together, pull one sticky side from the other, then scatter the bits on a table or the floor to see its fractured entirety. It’s innocent behavior, no one gets hurt, there was a whole object and then there’s an object ripped apart.

  It is at these moments especially that I miss my cat. He might be uncontrollable, wild or just independent, he may always be frightened of people, but he is my cat, and if I imagine him dead or lost, I become distressed, even grief-stricken. We are not allowed to have animals here, it is strictly forbidden, and many people miss their animals, figure out elaborate ways of visiting them, or have them lodged, though I know a man, he called himself an inventor, who kept his dog in a disused barn on the bounded property, and did not get into trouble, even when he was found out finally, since later he was allowed to return and took the same room and barn for himself. I remember him vividly because one night he stood on the balcony in the main hall and dropped his jeans and jockey shorts and exposed his well-shaped, rosy ass to everyone—the guy’s callipygous, someone shouted. His ass was pink, startling, its flesh sublime against the dark wood of the old large room, and its shape, like two halves of a ripe peach, and though having this image was an embarrassment then, it maintains itself. A spark of sexual interest ignited, the way a dog’s might in sniffing another dog’s ass, but it passed, yet, like his ass, the interest was also surprising, but sublime, carrying beauty and horror. The inventor always returns with his dog, though I have not seen him again. Time has passed, all we have is time, prosaically, and there’s nothing that is not in some way affected by time’s passage, so anything anyone makes, does, doesn’t do, or thinks is in debt to time, and all must pay their debt.

  The tall balding man owes a debt to the disconsolate psoriatic woman, I can tell he has promised her something, so their union does compromise her time and his, he’s engaged himself to her in his cryptic way, and it is usually better not to become intimate with another while in this community, because complications arise that must be faced at breakfast and dinner, though lunch is taken alone and then everything and everyone may be avoided, but seclusion comes to an end, always, with a generally unsatisfactory meal, and the person or persons whom you’ve contracted to yourself for a short or long while, in subtle, unspoken, muted, or direct ways, steps forward and wants something, everyone wants something. I do, often. Limitlessly I want, since I don’t know when to stop. The tall balding man runs daily, for hours and hours, he runs up mountains, ablaze, hoping to better his speed to the peak, and he might have a case of anorexia athletica, which must bind him, sympathetically, to the psoriatic one, whose eating habits parallel his excessive exercising. He can’t stop racing, his head high as he runs along the road, his lanky, muscular legs moving like a machine’s under him, his chest thrusting against a brisk wind, and always he is sweating, shunting off fluids, his palms especially, the effect of primary palmar hyperhidrosis, and also he glows, but his skin is taut, his cheeks sunken. He is considered healthy since he achieves much physically, but his w
ill to stay in shape unnerves me, though the Contesa insists he is a great success with women, and she supposes it’s because he runs.

  Now I can burn nothing more, have lost the heart to do it, and the fire is dying. I shut the lights, gather my things, put on my coat, grab the keys, close the door behind me, test the lock, walk energetically past the field outside the window, and hope to notice it better, so I open my eyes wide, but the light is weak, and I don’t see anything differently from before. It could be that I haven’t noticed a changed effect, so I scour the land fitfully, failing again to witness new beauty or defect, and soon reach the quaint building where I sleep, opening the door gingerly so as not to make a commotion, since I don’t want to announce my arrival to the others—the disconsolate young women, the tall balding man, if he’s about, a dour man and fretful woman, who may or may not be sharing a bed, neither has ever sat at my table or I at theirs, by design or chance—one of their beds squeaks and cries in the night when I walk to the toilet. This hotel is too full, I think. I tiptoe across creaking floorboards to my room, whose bed is pristine since I didn’t lie in it yet and ruffle its smooth facade. The bathroom is empty, my towels hang untouched, and I turn on the hot water, rinse the tub, though no ring’s around it, no trace of other bodies that have lain in it, I can become repulsed imagining strangers lying there, especially the demanding man, but I quickly shake my head and open the faucets, watch the water stream into the porcelain tub, and, after cleaning it cursorily, turn the water off, let the bath drain, and begin again, now liberally pouring in scented bath oils, whose dubious promise I gratefully accept. Then I walk briskly, not landing heavily on the balls of my feet, to get my portable radio. My father insisted I step lightly at all times, veer to and guide myself along an imaginary straight line, and, even today when I walk, I visualize a line on a road or dividing a room, the invisible pretense of which frequently unbalances me, since by concentrating on what isn’t there, I almost forget how to walk. Actors’ bodies are their instruments, they learn how to walk, J and JJ say, and to hold their bodies, for to embody their characters, they must have carriage and control. They frequently discuss their craft and have cited techniques for standing and walking, and some might scoff and sometimes do at the table, especially in the morning, if the actors are holding court, which they occasionally do, with spirit. I never scoff, because I often forget how to walk and wish I’d been taught properly, so that my back would never hurt. Still, there are many ways to walk, the variety astonishes if you analyze individuals navigating their way along a street, arms swing high or don’t, heads jut forward or shake, short strides are taken or loping ones, some move with fluidity while others awkwardly assert one foot after another, and there are those who take strong positions on approaches and techniques, as well as for teaching, walking, and standing. My father was a firm believer in standing up straight. Many believe standing and walking are activities, hardwired like language into the brain, that wouldn’t require training, but since some walk better, speak better, some know the grammar of bodies and sentences better than others, and many walk and stand poorly, though genetically transmitted, these inherent and humanly possible activities are at least educable. It’s a pity to see stooped adolescents, whose parents don’t know how to model them as birds do their little ones, to teach them by example how to fly and find food, yet even some baby birds fall to the ground and then they are finished, but I know a man who saves fallen baby birds. He is not here now, but he was for a while, and observing him tend birds and feed them worms was particularly heart-warming, though I can scold myself for caring more about their feeding than I do humans other than myself, but then I don’t understand the complaints of birds and can’t decipher their whining from their singing, so they aren’t annoying. Birdman was nourishing three fallen baby sparrows, with tiny white worms whose fate didn’t matter to me, that he bought in a pet store, caring for their mother, too, feeding three stray cats and two dogs, while managing, by cell phone and fax, a tourist company with his diabetic partner. I wondered what possessed him, how his mercy had developed, if he were ruthless in some aspects of his life, very cruel in love or business. We talked intimately one night for a very long time, and I’ve heard Birdman may return soon, and, if so, I’ll feed worms to birds with him, in order to find out.