Tales of Accidental Genius

by Simon Van Booy

  The manager of the facility thanked the magician and gave him a check for three hundred dollars. Eric held it up and said he would go home and make another one appear.

  At the door, he told Mary Ann that he hoped to see her again. Then, for some reason, he thought of the old man who had shuffled the cards.

  “Must be nice,” he said. “For an old man like that to have such a good friend as that woman.”

  Mary Ann laughed and looked at her white nurse’s shoes.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” she said. “Bill and Wilma have been married for almost sixty years—but think they met here.”

  The Muse

  IT WAS ALMOST midnight when her flight landed.

  Outside the terminal, taxi drivers drank coffee to keep themselves awake until morning. Being together helped pass the time. It reminded Alexandra of the men from her Ukrainian village who drove the school buses. How they clustered in the playground near the swings, waiting for the last bell that would summon everyone home to bright kitchens with extended family visiting from Kiev or Lutsk.

  Alexandra used to watch the bus drivers through her classroom window, laughing and chattering and moving their feet to keep warm. The children we once were, she thought, live inside us like rings on a tree.

  On her way from the airport to the hotel, the driver asked if she was thirsty, or would like the radio turned on. It had been raining all day, he told her. Then at dusk the rain stopped and there were people on the street again.

  Alexandra sometimes sent postcards to her parents in Sernyky, but never went beyond a description of the weather or some trivial detail of place. There were always more feelings than words to describe them.

  The car was warm and quiet. There was a beige cashmere blanket on the backseat. Alexandra put it behind her neck as a pillow. The city was illuminated entirely by streetlight and the bright shop windows made her feel safe. She imagined people in their homes, watching television, or sitting in bed, or eating something. Children had already swum out to sleep; bedroom doors left ajar kept their lives within reach.

  The driver asked if she was hungry. When she said she wasn’t, he asked if she had come a long way.

  Three or four times a year, Alexandra vanished like this, from her public world as a fashion designer to a city where she had no fixed identity.

  We’re not who we think we are, nor how others see us . . . , she once wrote in her journal. Long before death, we die a thousand times at the hands of definition. . . .

  After being alone for a few days, she would feel some pull of inspiration. It could come from anywhere: lemons in a bowl were enough; the blowing trees in the park were enough; the migration of clouds; the color of water; words from a passing conversation she carried with her like loose stones. From such feelings, Alexandra would create things for people to wear.

  WHEN THEY ARRIVED at the hotel, somebody opened her door. Her luggage was a single trunk with two initials on the outside. The receptionist wore silver-framed glasses and a light coating of aftershave. He said his name was Robert. His hair was thin and combed neatly to one side. He was happy to see her. The concierge on duty had been tracking her flight, and the mannequins and fabrics had arrived early from Milan and were in her suite as requested, as were several vases of her favorite white flowers.

  Alexandra signed the guest register and asked Robert if he had long before he could go home.

  “When the streetlights go off,” he said, “I know it’s almost time.” He told her that he didn’t mind being up late, and looked forward to eating breakfast with his partner before he left for his own job.

  Each new collection began like this, in a city with no association. Alexandra would wander the streets, stroll through a bustling market, ride an empty bus—drink coffee in a dockside café as birds circled the open mouth of dawn.

  In Berlin two years ago, Alexandra found a bench in the Volkspark Friedrichshain and watched people walk in circles, as though winding up the city.

  Then she found Uhrenwerkstatt, a shop that repaired watches and clocks. She went in and asked the owner to show her all the pieces no one had come back for. At first he was reluctant, but then, with a dozen timepieces laid out on a cloth, he couldn’t stop talking.

  Her winter collection that year was called Zeit Verloren or Time Lost.

  WHEN HER TRUNK was wheeled away on a lobby cart, Robert told the concierge he was leaving the desk—but then a telephone rang and Alexandra said quickly that she was fine, and wanted to go up to her room alone.

  As she stepped across the marble floor toward a bank of hotel elevators, she noticed a man standing very still with his eyes closed. He was holding a loose manuscript under one arm and his hands were in his pockets.

  “Excuse me,” she said, noticing something by his shoe. Alexandra bent down and picked it up. “I think you’ve lost a button.”

  The man opened his eyes and stared at her.

  “Let me sew it on for you.”

  “No, no, that’s all right,” he said, feeling for the errant thread on his velvet jacket. “I’m sure I can do it myself. How hard can it be?”

  “Harder than you think. Come on.”

  She led him over to the lounge and reached into her pocket for the silver sewing kit she always carried. It had belonged to her grandmother, and was the only thing she was afraid of losing.

  As he was removing his jacket, Alexandra noticed two stone statues behind him in the lobby. She imagined fingers shaping the cool rock, the pressure required to round a cheek or straighten a nose. The possibility of an expression, but the impossibility of breath.

  She was tired from her flight, and it took time for her fingers to thread the needle and position the button.

  “I hope I didn’t disturb you,” she said. “You were standing there with such concentration.”

  The man moved slightly in his seat. “I was thinking about that chandelier,” he said, pointing. “I’m here to finish a screenplay and I’ve decided the chandelier is somehow a part of it. I usually write in the lobby at night, then sleep in the day.”

  “Why not work in your room,” Alexandra asked, “where it’s quiet?”

  The man set his manuscript down on the seat and considered her question. “Maybe, in order to make people up, I need to see real ones.”

  Alexandra glanced up from her task. “Your chandelier reminds me of the heavy snows we had in Ukraine when I was a girl. But I don’t suppose you know where that is. Most people don’t.”

  The man turned to look. “Oh, I know exactly where it is,” he said.

  “Please don’t say Russia. . . .”

  The man smiled to show he understood, but kept staring past her at the chandelier. “Amazing how you see only the shape of light and not the material it’s made from. Inspiration has assumed the form.”

  “Sounds like something a writer would say,” Alexandra said. “Very artsy.”

  The man laughed. “I was raised to think that art was God’s work. My adoptive family was quite religious. Southern Baptists. Very strict.”

  “You were adopted?”

  “As a baby.”

  When she’d finished, Alexandra tugged at the button, then gave the man his jacket.

  “It was kind of you to do this.”

  “Blame my grandmother.”

  After he went upstairs, Alexandra decided to stay in the lounge and have tea by the fire. Robert was still at the check-in desk, and she watched him pick up the phone, nod, and write things down. She imagined him driving home through the cool morning air. The sound of his key churning the lock. Dawn pouring into the dark house. His partner stirring in the bed they have shared for so long. His head on the pillow. She wondered if Robert ever just stood there, watching him sleep.

  Later on, as she was settling into her room, there was a gentle knock.

  It was the concierge. “I’m sorry to bother you so late,” he said, handing her a sheaf of loose papers. “But the waiter found this where you were sitting d
ownstairs.”

  After he had gone, she read a few lines. It was a film script. On the second page it said:

  Dedicated to God.

  But if God doesn’t exist,

  Then to Larry.

  When she was ready for bed, Alexandra got under the covers and continued reading.

  IN THE MORNING, she drank black coffee and looked out the window. It was very early. She peered out over the rooftops and imagined each tall building slowly filling with people. A thousand days would soon begin—each one different from the other and impossible to predict. The sky above a single mass of white.

  Alexandra loved the severity of hotel sheets, and wondered how many feathers were stuffed inside her pillows, and what a shame they were no longer in the sky, attached to birds.

  After another cup of coffee, she began to draw.

  With a Japanese fountain pen and a bottle of engraver’s ink, she made sketches of the vague figures she had seen in her dream, and then of the landscape beyond her window, the seagulls, puffs of smoke, even the motionless animation of the lobby chandelier, which had so compelled the man downstairs that he made it a character in the ending of his screenplay.

  Untitled by Michael Snow was a love story, but to Alexandra it lacked some vital element, like each of the characters in The Wizard of Oz. It was not an ending he needed, but a pulse that beat independently of its creator.

  She ate some breakfast, then found her sunglasses and tied on a silk scarf. Before leaving her room, she called the front desk and was transferred to the room of Michael Snow. She wondered if he wrote under a pseudonym, but then realized that every name is a pseudonym. Language merely points, she had read once in a book of German poetry; the rest must be imagined.

  When no one answered, she left a message, explaining what had happened with his manuscript being left downstairs, that she had to go out—but to meet her by the pool around four P.M.

  SOMETIME IN THE afternoon, after a full day of walking around, Alexandra returned to the silence of her suite. It was a comfort to come back, as though part of her had stayed in the room.

  She removed her scarf and sunglasses and flicked on the lamp. From brown paper, Alexandra unwrapped an artist’s marionette she had bought at a shop with paper boats in the window. She set it on the desk and stared at the blank expression. Just like the statues downstairs in the lobby, it was a face that would never feel disappointment, nor flush with desire; no breath within its cheeks would ever quicken with the anticipation of being touched; it was in a human shape but lacked all humanity. She judged it to be interesting because it made her feel things that were missing. And that was the problem with Michael Snow’s screenplay, she realized, seeing the manuscript on her desk—that it worked so hard to conjure love, when love was most felt in its absence.

  THE LIFEGUARD FOLLOWED her silent path through the water. Light falling through the conservatory glass made her body look porcelain, and the opaque blue waves of the pool and the echo of people whispering made Alexandra feel like some doomed heroine from a 1920s novel.

  Nearby, a couple was reading from the same copy of the Wall Street Journal. Their voices hovered over the blue water. The woman had tied up her hair in the style of a ballerina.

  Outside the hotel, trees bent as the wind took their leaves.

  When it was almost four o’clock, Alexandra realized that she’d left the man’s script in her suite. By the time she returned to the pool, its author had arrived and was in the water. Alexandra watched his arms open and close. He seemed uncertain, and she suspected a childhood far from the sea or from some great river, like the Styr, which flowed only a few miles west of her village.

  She waved, then sat down and flicked through the screenplay with a pencil.

  The first thing she did was cross out Untitled on the first page, and write: The story of love is also the story of loneliness?

  After a few laps, the man got out and dried his body with a towel. Then he put on a robe, and came over.

  The waiter noticed she had company and brought menus.

  “I’m afraid there are no chandeliers in here to inspire you,” Alexandra said when he sat down. “Just a cocktail menu.”

  He saw she had written things on his script, but instead asked about her morning in the city. Had she seen the museum? The path around the lake? The little shops in the arcade?

  She gave a few details, then asked about his life growing up in America.

  He described things he thought might interest her, like going to revival, and church camp, and vintage car shows, and the annual state fair with country music stars sculpted from butter.

  Alexandra tried to imagine it all, tried to conjure a picture of him with friends in a Chevy or a Ford, opening all the windows, screaming the way Americans did in films when they were happy, singing along to the radio, the excitement of being out late, the glory of a night sky under which everything in the history of the world had once happened, and was now happening to him.

  He could not have known then, she thought, how one day he would live his life somewhere else—and that his happiness would come from things he had no notion of then, and from people he did not know even existed.

  He told the story of his first script and the long drive to Los Angeles in a half-ton white pickup truck. When he arrived, they wouldn’t even let him through the studio gates to deliver it. The guard said it happened every day.

  He found a two-room apartment in Echo Park and called his family once a week. He sold his truck to a contractor in Venice and bought an English motorcycle with a kick start. He said that Los Angeles was full of secular zeal, and that he often wrote in a booth at the twenty-four-hour kosher deli on Sunset Boulevard.

  One night he made friends with an elderly man in a tweed cap who used to come in for soup and just sit there. The old man was a writer too. He had worked with James Dean early in his career, and won an Oscar for Best Picture. After a while they began sitting in the same booth. One of the first things Larry told him was that you don’t write stories—they write you.

  Larry lived in Pacific Palisades, but had been raised in Brooklyn by Orthodox Jewish parents from Ukraine.

  Over the next couple of years, Michael and Larry discussed many things—not only whether God existed and differences between Judaism and Christianity, but ethics, beauty, theories of the universe, baseball, wives and marriage, the origins of war. Larry said he dreamed of going to Ukraine, literally dreamed of it: walking through fields barefoot at sunset . . . the impulse to pray Ma’ariv . . . his mother’s hands, and how they seemed to get smaller and smaller, until only the memory of how they felt remained.

  One day Michael had the idea to write a screenplay about the Old Testament story of Abraham and his son Isaac—a movie set in the present day, about parents willing to sacrifice the life of a child for their belief in some greater good. Larry helped Michael draw in the scenes, trim the dialogue, use silence effectively. . . .

  Six months later, a big studio bought the script and began casting.

  ALEXANDRA SAID THAT Larry sounded a little like her own father, with whom she would go walking or fishing. She described the place where she grew up in Ukraine, the snowfall, and the narrow lanes along the border with Belarus, the cool shade of trees in summer, and the dry, incessant wind.

  When she told him the name of her fashion house, Michael admitted that he’d heard of it—had read about her in newspapers, even passed one of her boutiques on Melrose Avenue—but to him she was just a woman who had kindly sewn on his button the night before.

  She confessed how it felt to see people wearing the dresses she designed: how it made her shy, how she hoped each piece enabled some secret part of the self to be shared with the world. And designing for runway was exhausting, she said, the traveling endless.

  When she was a girl her family had taken their meals at a large table—though not always at the same time. Sometimes she sat watching her mother boil pans of water for vegetables and large cuts of meat.
Sometimes she wrote her name in steam on the window, then peered through each letter into winter’s heart. On cold Sunday afternoons, she went with her father to the shed for logs. They were stacked under a blue tarp. He wrapped the pieces she was to carry in an old blanket to prevent splinters. Once a month her mother spread a towel on her shoulders, then the tug of wet hair and the small, ensuing snips of her hairdresser’s scissors; her mother shaking the towel over the sink, then the knock of a broom under the seat.

  Her grandmother watched from the kitchen table.

  “She was religious,” Alexandra said. “But not like you—more like Larry. They would have had things in common, I’m sure, like special words and customs, how things are supposed to be done. That’s all lost to me, I’m afraid, I don’t even celebrate the holidays. . . .”

  Michael listened as other moments of childhood rose to the surface of her eyes.

  When he asked what inspired her to become a designer, she told him how, one night when she was little, she’d woken up and wandered into the kitchen because her throat was dry.

  Sitting in the half-dark was her grandmother. She was repairing some garment with a needle and thread, and had not heard the figure of a child approach from behind. Alexandra remembers her sitting there, very still, in a deep chair beside a table of family photographs.

  Some of the pictures showed her late husband, and the many ages they had lived through. On her grandmother’s lap was the wool jacket he wore when they were young and took weekend trips in a silver car to Kiev. She was mending a tear in the lining, and with each loop, fused the separated pieces of fabric into one piece.

  In a wicker basket by her foot were other items that belonged to the family, including one of Alexandra’s bears, which was missing an eye.

  It was the first of many nights when she would creep out of bed and listen to her grandmother’s quiet hands working. Sometimes she would mutter something, or cease her sewing as winter flakes brushed the window.