American Genius

by Lynne Tillman

  —So, we’re around a campfire. We could tell stories, Contesa said, drolly.

  —Which kind? the Count asked.

  —Any kind. I had no stories of any kind to tell, I felt as empty and flat as my stomach.

  —May I ask for one? I was hedging.

  —That depends, Contesa said.

  —I’d like to know, if you don’t mind, Gardner, when you began to change night into day.

  —It’s not a proper story, he said.

  He poked the fire, bothered, laid on another bunch of thick sticks, turned from it, and sat upon the ground in front of us, tucking his calf-length, leather, fur-lined coat under him, and, as dusk neared, his horse face was almost frighteningly enigmatic or unreadable, with its high cheekbones pulling his skin taut, crafting craters or vaults beneath them.

  —In Paris, I found a timepiece along the Seine. I fell in love, you know. Rather, I decided to live. I returned to America. I had already inherited a great deal of money, with my father’s death. And when my mother died, I had even more. Too much, no doubt.

  I wondered how he felt about his parents’ deaths, but he didn’t say, and it was his story.

  —But I wasn’t idle. I studied. Languages, especially, and ancient history, the classics. I collected many museum-worthy pieces. Word got round. I was plagued by, let’s say, enthusiastic acquaintances. It’s not easy for me to send people away. One day a man showed up on my doorstep. He said he’d known Violet in Paris.

  Contesa’s face turned gloomy, impassive, or stricken.

  —He importuned me. I gave him money for a scheme. It went badly. He was a con man. He had come to my house at midday. I’m a rational man. And I knew two things. One, time is of human origin, and, two, since it is, I could use time as I wanted.

  He etched a circle on the ground with a pointed stick.

  —If I slept all day and rose and lived in the night, no one could bother me at lunchtime or during business hours. I hired a secretary to do what needed to be done in daytime hours—banking and so forth. I saw only a few close friends. That’s why I turned day into night. You see, it’s not a story.

  It was not what I expected or imagined, not at all, his story was simultaneously simple and complex, of a bizarre practicality that surpasses reason. Without response, Contesa and I absorbed his tale, the Count too, but unlike the silence between Birdman and me, it was full and comforting, and I felt less empty, though my stomach gurgled softly. While each of us rested, or not, in our own minds, I realized I’d missed an opportunity to inquire about his paroxysm. But the Count rose to fix and fuss with the fire again—I imagined he’d once been a heavy smoker—when Contesa nestled against me, like the beloved family cat my parents had killed a long time ago.

  —What would you like to hear? she asked.

  —What’s the story about your friend who conned Gardner? I asked.

  —Not that. Ask me another.

  —Unfair, the Count said.

  —It’s OK, I said.

  —I have a story, Contesa said. In the late 1950s, early 1960s, I was friends with a famous fashion model. This was in Paris. She was very beautiful, everyone knew her face. I knew her lover, actually he was my friend first. We were friends from back when. He was smart, great, but a dog. I adored him. I lived with them, in fact they took me in.

  The Count’s head had dropped. I couldn’t see his face, his eyes.

  —I was at loose ends. I’d been designing clothes, but it wasn’t working. So I took up social work, but that’s another story. I was twenty-nine. At loose ends. The model had a spectacular house in the 7th arrondissement. One Wednesday morning, she invited me to join her, that very afternoon, to fly to Rome. She was doing the shows. She wanted me to accompany her, she said. My friend would stay home and work—he was a soul brother, as we said then or maybe later. He wrote scripts. God, they’re a desperate breed. He made some money reviewing films, his French was flawless. I went to Rome, as her companion. Why not? She worked, and I walked around. I visited all of the museums and churches. I lit candles in every church. It was spring, I think. We ate fantastic dinners, on elegant patios overlooking the seven hills, way into the night. Always surrounded by her celebrity friends. There was a darling photographer . . . another story, another time. Rome lives at night. I drank too much. Now the Count followed Contesa’s every gesture, she was becoming a little Roman, her hands, patterns in the air, and he hung on her every word, just as I did.

  —Then Sunday came. I was about to go to Mass. As a pagan. But the model took me aside. She said, “I’ve changed your plane ticket.” I expected to fly back with her on Monday morning. She wanted me to go back to Paris that very night. She said, I remember this exactly, she said, “I’d like you to make sure the house is in order.” That’s all she said. I was put on a late flight. Everything had been arranged neatly. The Rome–Paris flight is fairly quick. But on it I felt uneasy. I didn’t know why. It was about three in the morning when I arrived at her house. I unlocked the door and entered. I heard moving around upstairs. There was a commotion, hushed voices, I just stood there. A woman, Lord, her lipstick was smeared, and her mascara, maybe she’d been crying, she came running down the stairs. She didn’t look at me, just ran past me and went straight out the door. Then my friend came down the stairs. He was like a sheepdog. It was almost funny. I helped him clean up—scads of empty wine bottles, ashtrays with red-lipsticked cigarettes, dirty glasses and dishes everywhere. It took hours. In the morning, the model arrived. Her house was in perfect order. I’d done my job, I’d done a great job. All was well on the home front. The next day, I left. She and I said nothing to each other. Nothing. I never saw her again.

  The finality of the story and her response alarmed me, I didn’t know what to make of it, why she had told it now, to us, but it must have been after that episode she returned to America, around the same time, I reckoned, as the Count.

  —You never saw her again? I asked.

  —Never, she repeated.

  —Tell us your story, Helen, the Count said.

  —Let me think. I need a little time.

  In their accounts, they’d been betrayed, they’d changed the directions of their lives and returned to America, but their stories also had different kinds of content. I could tell one in which I was good, bad, indifferent, young, cruel, sensitive, a helper, a hindrance, a victim, a victimizer, hero, bystander, or, like them, betrayed, by a colleague in the American History department, a best friend, a lover. Or one in which I’d betrayed someone, though I ‘m a sensitive person, and sensitive people need to believe they wouldn’t, so they often don’t recognize when they hurt others, but the worst kinds of sensitive people are those who believe themselves to be victims, so they victimize others righteously and viciously. I could tell them about my brother’s dramatic disappearance, but I knew too little about it and him, since my parents hardly ever mentioned it, then my father died soon after, but then the two might ask why I hadn’t searched for him, and I didn’t know myself I hadn’t known him, that was an explanation, he was so much older, my birth was planned, or a mistake, but I didn’t want to tell that story. I could talk about how I became an atheist, an historian, why I left the field and how I feel sad about America, or how I became a designer of objects, but now I want to undo things.

  —You’re taking a long time, Contesa said.

  —It doesn’t have to be a big deal, the Count said. You don’t have to, you know.

  —I’ve got a story, I said, impulsively. It’s funny. My mother had open-heart surgery about ten years ago, to correct a valve. They were going to give her a pig’s valve. I waited in the hospital while she had the operation. It’s a long operation, and she was seventy-eight, but pretty strong. She was old but healthy. Except for that valve. The anesthesia was almost the biggest issue, really. I waited in a very ugly reception area. Really awful. I became focused on the other people there, mostly families. I suppose that’s how I distracted myself Some were already grieving, pr
eparing themselves for the worst, the end . . .

  —Is this really a funny story? Contesa asked.

  —I think so. Everyone was so anxious, they barely knew anyone else was in the room. Some of them ate all the time. A lot of Chinese food. Everyone talked a lot, some were very loud. Some were quiet, and they looked totally blank. People constantly used the phone booths outside. They repeated everything they’d said in the waiting room. It drove me crazy. Hospitals look horrible. This waiting area was disgusting, and all the chairs had grease stains. Finally, the doctor came out and said I could go into the ICU and see her. I remember thinking when I walked there—major operations are life-changing. Some people never recover from the operation. People age overnight. I was thinking all this, when I got to the ICU. You had to push a steel square to open these big doors, and they swung open, at you. And then I was facing the bed where my father died, the same bed. I was really thrown by that. But I found an ICU nurse and asked if I could see my mother. She asked her name and I told her, and she said, without hesitation, Bed Ten. I walked past the other beds to get to Bed Ten, it was almost the last bed. So I looked at all the people lying there, with gray faces and tubes everywhere. I kept telling myself that my mother might not be recognizable anymore. I prepared myself not to recognize her. I got to Bed Ten and went to my mother. I looked at her face. Her face was very different. Her nose was much wider. Her face was wide, it was very swollen, so I thought, OK. But her skin tone was entirely different, she was a different color—then I figured that came from the anesthesia. She’s sensitive to meds. Anyway, I really didn’t recognize her. I stood there for a while, taking this in. But she looked so unlike herself, it was crazy. So I went back to the nurses’ station. I said to the same nurse, “I’m sorry, but that woman doesn’t look like my mother.” Then the nurse glanced at her clipboard and said, “Sorry, your mother’s in Bed Twelve.”

  The Count laughed, Contesa did, also, a little after him, as if against her will. I’d recounted the story easily, all set in my memory, so I knew never forget it, until I did, when I no longer needed it or couldn’t retain it.

  —There’s your darkness, Contesa said.

  —A gallows humorist, the Count said.

  I laid my head on Contesa’s lap, the Count fed the fire some more, and it leaped up energetically, exhausting me further with its dizzying patterns, so I shut my eyes.

  The Turkish poet was in the room, I was having sex, with him, “Why do you wear a bar?” he asked. “Don’t you mean bra?” I asked. “No,” he said. I was nineteen, his name was Adam, his long hair hung in waves, and in the room, there was a perfect chair, it was beautiful, but was it mine? I wanted one, and what would it mean about my life if I didn’t have one. I could design it, so I searched for materials in a desert, but where was I looking, there’s nothing to use.” Why do you need a perfect chair?” someone asked, maybe Contesa. “That’s a tall order,” someone said, not me, I’m tall, but not tall enough, and I climbed a high chair. Many cats played underneath, all of them black with white paws, but I had to care for an abandoned dog, when my father appeared and said, “Don’t look . . .”

  —Helen. Helen. Wake up.

  I heard my name.

  After I had rested my head on Contesa’s lap, I instantly dropped off, briefly but completely, and I wanted to keep on sleeping, but the Count said I had to wake up, we had to go, it was getting dark, soon it’d be dinnertime in the residence, and I remembered I’d made an appointment for drinks with Spike and the Turkish poet. The Count and Contesa had flashlights, there was nothing to worry about, nothing at all, and I brushed myself off and traipsed after them sleepily.

  —We’re nearly there, just a few more minutes, Helen, Contesa said.

  —Where are we?

  —Near the main house, the Count said.

  —What do you mean?

  —We walked in a very wide circle, then smaller ones, behind, around the community. Actually, more like an ellipse.

  I have no sense of direction, and, when the main house came into sight, the Count was beside me, he was returning, after all, if he was, but when we were leaving each other, to prepare for dinner—I thought I might check the mail first—I wished I’d told a story about the family cat instead of the one I did, I wasn’t sure what I had told them, really, but I wished it’d been something else. I’d rarely thought of wishes before, now I was thinking about them often, Moira’s dictum lodged in me, not so much about a wish to speak to the dead, but about the wish itself, and I realized that, if you have wishes against all reason, immune to reality, if you have wishes no matter what, then the wish trumps everything, always, and so, in a sense, nothing else matters as much. There it was, the triumph of the wish. This notion satisfied me, though if valid or true, it wouldn’t permit satisfaction, because most wishes don’t come true and instead ache like unanswered lust. Still, wishes foment relationships, history, design, there are so many wishes, unacknowledged longings for the impossible precede every endeavor, and consequently, there are so many failures, but then there are significant exceptions, history often tells the story of exceptions. I might wish to make my skin immaterial and stop itching.

  To mark the day with the Count and Contesa, as well as to humor myself, I called it Triumph of the Wish and imagined that very soon I’d design and build a chair that deserved that title, so that I might sit upon a wish. I might also unfurl the Fabric Monolith, not now, but someday, because it was a wish. I contemplated doing it, spreading out the cloth, or unrolling the material past itself, and, as I entered the main house, I avoided the gaze of certain residents, especially the demanding man, signed in, and walked along an imaginary straight line to the small, woodsy, cedar mailroom, to see what news awaited me.

  I CAN LIVE WITH, AMONG, and in almost anything anywhere for a while, most arrangements satisfy for a day, a week, six months or more, occasionally not at all or never, not even for an hour, if, for instance, you’re being suffocated, starved, or tortured, but mostly free of restraints, I want to start over and try something else, because I’m dissatisfied, restless, form an opinion about the possibilities available, and reach the end of my rope. Not long after Triumph of the Wish, I awoke to the clock radio, listened to the mellifluous, empty radio voices, turned them on and off with increasing agitation, avoided breakfast until I couldn’t stand the idea of not eating until lunch, which is usually poor, and also chose, maybe arbitrarily, choice often is, if you have a choice, which is deceptively uncommon, but nevertheless I decided, as I dressed quickly in lightweight one hundred percent cotton black slacks and a gray-and-black striped, long-sleeved cotton boatneck jersey, to leave the community. Its residential flux no longer compelled me, instead, it grated, the view outside my window as I worked or contemplated palled, a silly story, which involved Henry, Arthur, the kitchen helper, and myself, exasperated me, but it implicated me, in a sense, in more of the same, an expected occurrence in a small community, indicating also it was probably time to leave. Spike, whose wit and humor I relied upon, whose ramrod-straight posture my father would’ve liked, had turned peevish and severe as a Shaker chair, while the Turkish poet rarely left his room, the disconsolate women fought at dinner, and the tall balding man shifted his desire to a new resident, a prematurely gray-haired and attractive vegan, whose occupation I couldn’t figure out. I considered mentioning to the tall balding man, more than once, the new moisture-management fabrics, such as Coolmax and Moistex, that quickly absorb and dry sweat, knitted from polyester fibers, an aid to sufferers of primary palmar hyperhidrosis, but when he clasped my hand in his wet palms, with a sincerity I didn’t know he felt, I didn’t tell him, because usually it’s better not to say anything. Even the demanding man felt familiar and bearable, so in opposition to what I might also become, especially to myself, I knew it was time to go, though it’s impossible ever to grasp time’s truth, if it has any, which is dubious, or discover with absolute surety the right idea, but the staff encouraged me. Soon I prepared for my retu
rn to the place I call home by spending a good week deliberating about and sorting my clutter, a day or two burning what was no longer necessary, which entailed building many fires by the Count’s method and making more decisions than I wanted to make, and often I tossed small cardboard objects, bits of paper, doodles for designs, notes, quotations I collected (Curt Flood, “I am pleased God gave me black skin. I wish he’d made it thicker”; Oscar Levant, “I can stand anything except failure”; Sigmund Freud, “Consideration for the dead, who, after all, no longer need it, is more important to us than truth, and, certainly, for most of us, than consideration for the living”; Hannah Arendt, “Appearing beings living in a world of appearances have an urge to show themselves”; Ralph Waldo Emerson to Oliver Wendell Holmes, “When you strike at a king, you must kill him”) into cardboard boxes labeled “Miscellaneous.” I instituted a novel system to allow for contingency by which I filed shapeless or promising concepts into colorful folders, whose colors corresponded to my color/number system, at last employing that idea usefully, and washed my clothes in one hundred percent Ivory Snow for sensitive skin, my lamb’s wool, angora, and cashmere sweaters in Woolite, and packed them, actually rolled them to avoid wrinkles, in two sturdy black nylon suitcases with wheels.

  I RETURNED ALL OF THE books under my bed or by my worktable to the library, where Moira appeared, which was and wasn’t a surprise. She wore her Limited jeans, a white wool, loose-knit sweater, no hat, a lightweight orange polyester jacket, it may have been deer-hunting season, and we said hello in a friendly way, but nothing more. Moira watched me place books on shelves, write my first name and the book’s title in a log on a line next to the day’s date, indicating that I’d returned each and when. I must have been there an hour or so shelving and collecting my thoughts, some of which were about the Dewey Decimal System, when Moira said: