—Me, too, for dinner. Lighten up, Helen. I have to find Moira before she leaves.
—Who’s Moira?
—Moira was the narrator in Violet’s thing, I met her in town the last time I was here.
Lighten up. One easy reservation is that I question his sanity, my sanity, and my need to question sanity, a concept I hold in abeyance, then I question his reason, as sanity and reason are often synonymous, which can make for deadly dull days and nights. I wonder who else will join us, apart from Contesa and Moira, that odd inquisitive woman, whose appearance in my life has been accidental, but this encounter will be deliberate, a séance with Moira and unnamed others, but I don’t ask the Magician to reveal them, because he might name the demanding man or someone else about whom I’m uneasy.
He wants to meet in the Rotunda Room at midnight, which is in less than two hours, and he’ll gather other sitters—a sitting, he informs me, is a séance—and exhorts me not to worry, because he’ll make sure they’re sympathetic people, and it’s an adventure, he insists.
—Why are you doing this? It’s strange. We just met.
—Violet started something in my head, she started me thinking.
He repeats vigorously, his jowls shaking, that he has a sense about me, he explains that he acts on his impulses, because he writes obituaries for a living, and death is in his face every day, and the fact is you never know when you’re going to buy it, unless you kill yourself, you never know. He’s adamant.
—If the spirit moves me, I just do it. Life is short. Hell, there’s no time to lose.
He rushes off to find Moira.
I WISH HE HADN’T SAID that, No time to lose. I’m in his sights, his excited behavior disallows time’s unfolding casually, to be crafted carelessly or by pondering and reflection, but now his impulse crashes into me, so I may have to let things drop or get out of control, I may let myself go or not go but I can’t stop, it’s hard to stop when something has been set irresistibly in motion. I may want a genuine experience, whatever that is, as everything is in some sense experiential, and also there could be an obstacle I might overcome, I’m mindful of that, and in a curious way a séance, which appears nonsensical, might make sense. Wittgenstein said, “If no one ever did anything silly, nothing intelligent would ever be done.” Plainly, it is an accident, a cosmic joke, whatever that means, that I’m in the Magician’s path, since our conjunction is unplanned, which idea instantly delights me, its novelty supplants others that raise caution, and my impatience festers, while anxiety blooms. But time drags before the adventure, time to kill, that’s all there is, I hate killing it, but I’m not averse to killing other things. I heard about a woman here last year who refused to kill a living creature, who’d taken a vow in a ceremony at the peak of a local snowcapped mountain, and then allowed cockroaches to thrive and encouraged mice to breed in her room, until there was an infestation of cockroaches and hundreds of mice, since a breeding pair can produce fifty thousand in a year, and the stench and filth required the town authorities and residential staff to remove her forcibly. She is a purist and would not, rumor had it, listen to reason and kill the creatures mercifully, but her ethical position, logical if not reasonable when taken to an extreme, also distinguishes saints, activists, and visionaries. I protect some animals and not others, I eat some and not others, some vegetarians eat fish, most wear leather, to be stylish or warm, most are indifferent to some types of killing, particularly the kind that inconveniences them, and when a cat I owned turned vicious and stalked me, after employing various tactics to subdue its fury, behavior modification training, exotic music, unearthly sounds, and tranquilizers, I had it killed. If I participate in this séance, it will not be as a purist, but a temporary renegade from categories of reason. I’m free not to submit to the experiment or experience, but experience is what I want, or it is the only thing I have, I’m its sum, a vaporous being, since, like time, it disappears and leaves only memory, which is unreliable and about which I have no choice, and, when I pile up more experiences, I’ll have more history that I will forget or inaccurately render, so I’ll also be the sum of more regrets and mistakes. It could be the reason not to do anything, which I also do, nothing. I incline toward the new and also bend back toward the old, to an appreciation of history, though in recent years I prefer the study of design, but neither is escapable, and I would like to imagine communication with the dead, my dead friend explaining how he died on a mountain, my father advising me to tell my mother he still loves her, that he didn’t want to leave her alone, or that he applauds my quitting history for the study of design and to make or unmake objects. I don’t believe or expect any of this, but I’m susceptible to what I don’t know or believe, too, since after my father died, on the same night he was taken without saying a last word, a mist of steam or vapor rose and hovered over my mother’s body, I watched the little cloud from a chair, because I couldn’t sleep, and I thought it was him, bidding us farewell, his spirit having departed his body, leaving just a mistiness, which I don’t believe, so then I locked myself in the bathroom, read the Farmer’s Almanac for 1994, and scrawled lines about dying that in the morning were illegible or made no sense, but uncannily also made sense, since death takes everything, every sense, apart and renders everything indecipherable. If my father visits, I might voice what I couldn’t or never did before, but I scarcely can let myself think of the impossible and also don’t visit cemeteries, sit on graves and talk to my friends’ tombstones, as if they could hear me, though I’d like to believe they do and that if I spoke to them and they heard, it would reassure them of their not being forgotten, that somehow they live in death. But I refuse to talk to a tombstone, I reject its efficacy, reject the fantasy, although paradoxically I acknowledge the truth of the fantastic, since imagination is also knowledge, before it knows itself as useful.
On a serviceable, dark brown wooden bureau or dresser against one of the walls in my bedroom is an array of creams and potions, to reduce or lessen wrinkles, to smooth, lubricate, or moisturize, to coddle the body and face, and I might relax that way. I watch them, inanimate containers of soothing, energizing hope. New anti-aging creams claim to do as much as medical procedures, these contain pentapeptides, small groups of long-chain amino acids that function as medical messengers throughout the body, initially developed to help in the healing of wounds. As part of the body’s natural response to helping skin heal, peptides were found instrumental in increasing cells to generate more collagen, and collagen is critical to how the skin ages. My Polish cosmetician sometimes applies a collagen mask to my face, during which I lie under a pink or blue fluffy blanket for at least twenty minutes while it nourishes my skin, and she talks on the telephone in Polish, so that I don’t know what she’s saying, which is a blessing probably, but because my skin is sensitive, she avoids dramatic changes, oils and creams, treatments that might cause a rash or, worse, hives, or urticaria, but a collagen mask isn’t an irritant. It is supposed to supplant or augment the natural collagen I’ve lost as I’ve grown older, it’s supposed to replenish it and plump up the cheeks, and for some hours after the mask, I believe my cheeks are plumper. She says so, she insists on the beneficial effects of her work, as everyone does, few want to believe that what they are doing is insufficient, ineffective, or actually damaging, parents slap their children in the child’s interest, surgeons perform unnecessary hysterectomies, people abandon dependent pets in parks and on streets, because they’ve become a nuisance, pets bring out the best and worst human behavior, and the Polish beautician believes in her work and in herself, and I do also, since much well-being is facilitated and benefited by a placebo effect. On a rare occasion, when she was nearly garrulous, she told me that she took care of her elderly mother, who wanted her to live with her, which didn’t surprise me, that she cooks meals in advance for her, places each one wrapped in aluminum foil in a freezer, when she goes on an outing with her friends, and that every Sunday the two attend church together. She sighed and th
en patted my forehead with a potion that smelled of honeysuckle. Occasionally I desire an orderly life such as the one the Polish cosmetician narrates, designed with weekly appointments with her mother, by a religious faith and a God who watches her mostly with love and sometimes disapprobation to whom she can confess and by whom be forgiven, by an adherence to discipline, by strenuous outings with like-minded, robust friends, and a regular job during which every day but Sunday and Monday she waxes legs and moustaches, cleans, shapes and cuts nails, polishes them with a full range of brilliant hues and colors, applies soothing masks and salubrious if worthless creams to women’s faces, but I can also imagine she dislikes her boss, who is rarely there and who calls from home and gives her orders, who is married and has children, and that my cosmetician also seethes at her mother’s strict regulation of her, a woman of thirty-eight, who doesn’t want to marry again or have glum men visiting her unasked in her place of work, or who may want their sexual advances, but whose deepest interests or dissatisfactions lie in areas she’d never express to me. Or, she may have none. Next to the creams on the plain wooden dresser, a crystal ball, a gift from a dead friend, insinuates itself now as an omen.
I may walk to the library, since there’s none of my clutter there, and much to distract me, I could read manuals and encyclopedias, or listen to music and dance, but other residents may be there with their chatter and clutter, and I must clear my mind of its current static. The study of history once offered me a blanket of security, and I miss its reticence about what it can claim, what proofs it needs, its methodical labors, so, rather than my destiny, should I have one, which I don’t accept, yet in some way can’t entirely reject and which may anyway await me, I roust Manifest Destiny, whose self-serving assumptions have, since I was a teenager, fascinated me, though I was never able, when I taught teenagers, to transmit my wonder. “We shall be as a City upon a Hill,” John Winthrop wrote, and on they trekked and settled their new Israel, which the Louisiana Purchase doubled in 1803, and “Westward Ho,” without qualm, where settlers annihilated natives who obstructed their mission, since it was sanctified by God, these revolutionists who’d swapped beliefs, from God’s having blessed monarchs with a divine right of succession, to having blessed them with a bountiful land, theirs at any cost. The Puritans were hardworking, unforgiving, and practical people, though Winthrop’s letters to his wife were tender, immoderately affectionate, and even lustful. I felt so sad about America, suddenly, I had left it, or it had left me.
Homer believed that the gods spin ruin to men in order that there might be song and remembrance, and, in The Iliad, Helen thought Zeus brought evil to her and Paris “so that in days to come we shall be a song for men yet to be.” Some write songs about ruinous beliefs and philosophies of the past, which at the time appeared undeniably true, but more revel in a placid pool of amnesia and swim with forgetfulness, since remembering can be an encumbrance, delaying rapid movement. I don’t want to cherish or memorialize memory, create and keep it in its own image, call its loss a sacrilege, confuse it with nostalgia, since I forget more than I remember, though I can recall facts, dates, what I’ve read, and conversations easily, but I’m not sure what obligation I have to memory’s cause, uncertain what remembering signifies, or why it necessarily makes human beings better than animals, since memories are two-faced, they avoid trouble or lead to it, as revenge is a motive for drama and war that might die out if not for the resilience of memory, though some think revenge lies waiting in DNA, which is a problem. Everything is a problem, I can’t think of anything significant that isn’t a problem from the past for the future, and though I erect temporary altars to what I remember, some of which feels permanent, as I remember scenes exactly the same way for years until I don’t, I’m wary of its drastic claims on the present, especially for sensitive people.
If the Puritans hadn’t been persecuted and left England, if scientists hadn’t wondered if the world were round, if adventurers hadn’t despised ordinary limits and sought vistas beyond their eyes, since people have wants and can’t stop themselves, if there hadn’t been a slave trade, then if Manifest Destiny hadn’t been theorized, there wouldn’t have been an expansion of the territories or the extermination of Indian nations, if righteousness didn’t prevail, there wouldn’t have been a Bloody Kansas, there wouldn’t have been a Civil War, except states’ rights were from the start a singularly important, pernicious issue for our new nation, and without slavery there wouldn’t have been a war, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have been shot by John Wilkes Booth. Mary Todd Lincoln attended séances after her sons died, but if her husband hadn’t been assassinated, she might not have attended more of them, certainly not for him, or have gone mad, but she was rumored to have been mad also when Lincoln was alive, and I might be Austrian, never born or already dead. None of this supports a cessation of sensation, or a sensible quiet in the present. I can’t undo it, thinking doesn’t, I can better take apart a chair in another corner of my room, one that is wrapped in white muslin doth around its back and seat, damaged and in need of repair, but I may keep it as is, imperfect, a material journal of wounds. I want a perfect chair, like the Minola armchair, by Carlo Mollino, designed during World War II, in Turin, when quality materials were scarce but skilled craftspeople were still available, with an ebonized wood frame, covered in velvet. I have sat in it twice and considered buying it, but I might one day want to take it apart, and no chair held me or my back better or felt more right for my frame, nothing held me better except the arms of a certain man. Wrapped in a Minola armchair, I could dream and speculate, also about my history shadowed by a bigger one, I might have done other than what I did, about some things I had some choice, though about most I didn’t, and, in the middle of my life, I can look back and be content or restive. I may pursue my interests, I have time, it’s what I have, proverbially I could walk other paths, or invent new versions of the past to believe, there are songs of ruin worth mentioning, and some of us live with the threat of mortification.
Across from my bed, the dark wooden bureau is off center and a framed print above it, not of my choosing, of a bearded doctor, the founder of this institution, is also askew. His impervious dark eyes, even aslant, peer at me. The housekeeper must have, when making the bed, moved the bureau and picture to dean both more thoroughly and then she must have forgotten to return them to their original places. I feel an intense heat in the room, often the furnace goes berserk or one of the residents adjusts the thermostat to suit him or her better, which inconveniences others, who often return it to a lower or higher temperature, and this can go on all night or morning, surreptitiously, except that everyone may experience the change of heat. My skin actively dries, shrinks, and is fiendishly itchy, augmented by my condition, dermatographia, and I get off the bed and walk to the dresser, first, employing my weight to align it against the wall, to center it as well as the generic portrait of the founder, and then I discard my clothes, which scratch me like a hair shirt, choose a thick cream that promises Immediate Relief and slap it on my arms, and hands, rub it gingerly on my chest, breasts, stomach, and shoulders, and select another for my face, Revitalizing Richness, which I carefully apply, patting the skin and moving my fingers in circles, while making sure to keep off the soft tissue under my eyes. For a moment, I forget my legs, at the bottom of one is a scab or a circle of scaly skin, pinkish, the size of a dime, and it could be psoriasis, I will telephone my dermatologist, he might diagnose it over the phone, even though he doesn’t like to, though in my case he makes exceptions, because I have been his patient a long time, he believes I can report my condition in detail, and we have a good relationship, whatever that means. Now I wrap a queen-size all-cotton white towel around me. Outside, the wind gusts, shaking the trees, it blows frantically and whines, I’m protected in this room, relatively safe or merely sheltered, which is a privilege, too, so I think about Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, in which, with the Civil War just ended, Lincoln sai
d that each side claimed the same Bible for different ends, “each invoked His aid against the other.” He called for “malice toward none.” My father and I watched JFK’s inauguration on TY, in our spacious den, with the blond Eames chairs and table in the back of its two open, connected rooms, with its walls of sliding glass windows. JFK proclaimed “we dare not forget today that we are heirs of that first revolution,” a heritage I claimed, and, later, with his hat, the new president shielded Robert Frost’s old eyes from a noon sun that glared and obliterated the words on a bright white sheet of paper, from which he attempted to read an occasional poem, “Kitty Hawk,” and failed; then from memory Frost recited “The Gift Outright,” whose lines also suited the occasion, as if penned by a recidivist Puritan: “The land was ours before we were the land’s . . .” My father leaned in toward the television, and the venerated poet, aged and stooped, his brilliant white hair like a halo, leaned against the handsome young president, who was not healthy, but very few knew that then, who would soon be assassinated, but no one could know that then except a seer, and everything was helter skelter.
By now Leslie Van Houten has finished eating her institutional dinner and may lie on a cot in her cell in the women’s prison at Frontera, California, planning for her next parole hearing, expecting the worst, since her crime was heinous, and she might never be released or pardoned. I veer toward an unshakable admiration for the rule of law and, in the American way, with undeniable fascination toward those who break it, and to those who, failing to find truth, mete out justice, or for those who, professing any and all law restrictive, violate it, especially a criminal who applies a unique standard that appears just or more human, though I don’t support violent crimes against persons. Leslie Van Houten was the least culpable of the girls in the Manson Family, she’s now sustained by hope and religion, she’s been born again, and even if she’s released when she’s old, her youth long gone, she knows in her heart she’s been rehabilitated, she knows it, she’s not that girl who stuck a knife into Rosemary LaBianca’s back nineteen times. Still, Leslie relives her absurd and terrible crime, her lawless association with Manson and the Family, her devoted love of him, and does penance, but it can never be enough, she can’t explain herself, the girl she was then, she doesn’t know why she did what she did. It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t matter that she’d never do it again. This too doesn’t make sense, and she can’t recognize that person, but it doesn’t matter.
American Genius Page 30
