Tales of Accidental Genius

by Simon Van Booy

David ordered meat for his main course, while Rebecca tried a white fish she had never heard of. When the plates arrived, the waiter left them alone to eat and talk. David was enjoying the wine immensely.

  “Is there anything you’ve ever wanted to know about me?” he said after a long silence. “Any question you’ve always wanted to ask? Or something you’ve always wanted to tell me?”

  “Same for me,” Rebecca said. “Tell me anything you want, or ask me anything. I’m completely open.”

  “No, I mean it,” David said. “I’m really serious. I want to share everything with you.”

  They had been through many life events. The death of David’s mother; the birth of their children; the 9/11 attacks when Judy was only a few months old, and how worried they were about breathing the air. Then the birth of Michael—and the suspicion of Asperger’s when he started school. It was about then their careers really took off, and they could finally go places like Paris and Hawaii.

  “You’re a great husband,” Rebecca said.

  David laughed. “Tell me what you mean by that. I’m curious. I really want to know.”

  “Well, you’ve never been unkind or unfair, or controlling, like so many people.”

  Although she did not say it, the only time David had been cruel was when his mother was dying and he was with her all the time. Then he had said things she would never forget—that he was tired of being needed by everyone and dreamed of a different life far away by himself. Rebecca had listened, a lump forming in her throat. Tried to hold him but he didn’t want to be held. Didn’t want to be touched.

  When they had first met, on the uptown N train, David was at a time in his life when he wasn’t speaking to his mother at all. Hadn’t spoken to her for about three years after dropping out of Amherst College to live in New York City and become a writer.

  Then, a few years later, when David proposed in Los Angeles at the fancy hotel, Rebecca insisted he tell his mother the news, try to forgive her, perhaps rebuild their relationship. She said that the way a man treats his mother is an indication of how he’ll treat his wife.

  David agreed to do it and got back in touch—but it sapped a lot from their own relationship, and was something Rebecca regretted making him do.

  When they were on speaking terms again, David’s mother bought a studio on the Upper East Side. Sometimes, she would call thirty times in a single day, or in the middle of the night crying—asking David to come over because of a noise, or a pain in her chest, or something terrible she’d seen on the news and thought was happening to her.

  Looking after her used the same energy he needed for the relationship. Rebecca coped with it all by drinking, the way she drank back in high school when she was alone or when she felt she was alone.

  Not long after they were married, something happened.

  It was when David’s mother was at her worst, and—although they didn’t know it—was in the last few weeks of her life. David was staying at her studio several nights a week and Rebecca was drinking more than ever, going out to bars, having fun with people she never saw again.

  When she confessed what had happened, David kept saying, “In our bed? In our bed, Rebecca?”

  Then he disappeared. Just vanished, for three whole days and nights.

  It was the only time Rebecca felt like killing herself. She had never told anyone but now understood how people were able to do it when she noticed flowers and laminated photographs on the Williamsburg Bridge.

  On the fourth day, David came back. Rebecca had cleared out every bottle in the house and left leaflets on the table from a support group for alcoholics.

  “THERE IS SOMETHING,” Rebecca said, once the waiter had taken their order for dessert. “Something I’ve always been curious about.”

  David wiped his mouth. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  And so Rebecca asked where he was for those three days. It was the only thing she didn’t know. The only question she had left.

  David stared at her for so long she began to feel uncomfortable seated there in expensive wedge heels and the Italian dress purchased a year earlier for the National Book Awards dinner.

  “I thought you’d forgotten about that,” he said finally. “Seems like such a long time ago.”

  “You said anything, David—and that’s the only thing.”

  David put down his glass and Rebecca realized he was more than a little drunk.

  “I only ask because I feel so close to you,” she said, touching his hand. “Because there’s nothing that could come between us now.”

  “That was a tough time.”

  “What I did, I can never forgive myself for. You know that, right?”

  David picked up his glass again, rolled his fingers on the stem. “Well, it’s not the worst thing that ever happened in the world.”

  “It was to me,” she said. “Almost losing you, I mean.”

  “Listen, Rebecca, some people see their families tortured, or lose their kids, or watch them get raped or blown to bits. What happened to us is really not that bad when you look at history.”

  Rebecca held the napkin to her face. “I’m going to ruin my makeup.”

  The waiter saw what was happening and took their desserts on a loop.

  “I just can’t believe you came back,” she said. “I always wondered what made you come back.”

  She had imagined a lover, an old flame from Amherst who wore black glasses and men’s shirts—or some five-star hotel on the Upper East Side, where girls discreetly work the bars and the restaurants.

  “I was worried you were dead.”

  David laughed, “It almost happened. After staying with a colleague in Westchester for two days, my plan was to drive north to Montreal to clear my head. I’d always thought I could live there, in Canada, and if anything ever happened, it was a place I knew I could go start over. But then on the journey north it started raining so bad, I couldn’t even see out the window, and the fan in that old Porsche didn’t work, so I was struggling just to stay on the highway—just to see where I was going.”

  “I loved that car,” Rebecca said.

  “It was my father’s, did I ever tell you that?”

  Rebecca said she knew.

  “Well, anyway, with the rain and the blower not working, I had to turn off and find a motel.”

  “What happened then? What did you do there?”

  “I found myself a few miles outside a little town in upstate New York.”

  “What was the name? Have we been there?”

  “I can’t remember,” David said. “I could probably look it up, but I couldn’t tell you now.”

  IT COULD HAVE been anywhere and wouldn’t have mattered. After checking into a roadside motel, David took a long shower. Then he sat on the bed drinking black coffee and listening to the rain. His wife had cheated on him and he had to decide if he wanted a divorce and where he was going to live and what he was going to do with his mother, who needed full-time care.

  He reached for the television remote on his side table, but the sound of people laughing and going about their lives made him panic, so he pulled on his corduroys, buttoned up his shirt, and went back outside. At first the car wouldn’t start, so he let it sit, figuring he’d flooded the engine by pulling too hard on the choke. It had stopped raining by then, so he walked to a gas station and bought cigarettes. A girl he wanted to have sex with in college used to smoke Merit Lights in his room listening to Nick Drake. She wore long cashmere sweaters over bare legs. When he felt himself getting hard, he marveled at the unsentimental logic of his body and imagined his wife at home in their apartment, lights off, motionless on the bed, makeup all smudged like marks from a fire. He couldn’t decide if her eyes were open or if they were closed.

  It was still too early to feel anything except fear.

  Would she be someone he would come to hate? Or pity? Someone for whom he would feel nothing?

  The man in the gas station told him town was five miles up Route 17,
and there were places to have dinner on Main Street, burgers and such.

  The rain had stopped but the road was still very dark and David had to lean forward in the low seat to see. When he got near town, he parked and walked toward the lights of Main Street. He wasn’t hungry anymore, but it felt good to move his legs. He tried to imagine when in history the brick buildings had appeared grand, with candles or oil lamps glowing in all the windows. Now most stood empty, on the verge of collapse, riddled with rats and mold. He wished he were back at the hotel in the shower where it was bright, and he could stand there and close his eyes under the steady water.

  But just before turning around, he noticed lights moving up ahead on the sidewalk, and wondered whether it was a shop open late or some local bar.

  When he got there, the windows were fogged so he put his face right up to the glass. Inside, an audience of about thirty or forty people was seated in perfect stillness as children clambered about on a makeshift stage. David could see their bodies darting to and fro in costumes made from old curtains and bedsheets, could hear their heavy shoes dragging over the hollow wood, up and down the stage steps.

  The street was still completely deserted, and no one inside seemed to notice he was there.

  In the wings, someone was operating spotlights by hand. These were the lights that had beckoned him. He couldn’t tell what play it was, but could hear the voices of the children and make out their cries. Things they had rehearsed again and again were finally happening for real.

  Then a child climbed onto the stage by herself and started to sing. When David strained to see, he could tell from her face that the girl had Down syndrome.

  The other children, still in their costumes, had gathered at either side of the stage. Taller ones at the front knelt down as though in worship.

  When the girl forgot the words halfway through the song, her tongue went quickly in and out of her mouth, and she turned her body from side to side as the piano went on playing. David could not see into the room well enough to tell if she was embarrassed, but knew that she was, could feel it in his body as he stood there, and knew that others could feel it too. It was the biggest night of the girl’s life. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. She had been so nervous about messing up it was hard to breathe.

  Then a heavyset man in the audience reached quickly for the hand of the woman next to him, and it was suddenly clear to David that the girl standing alone on the stage was actually his wife, but also his mother—even the man Rebecca had taken into their bed a few days before. And he felt sorry for them, and for himself, and was no longer afraid.

  Private Life of a Famous Chinese Film Director

  LONGWEI KISSED HIS sleeping wife goodbye. Her body lay under a single sheet, sculpted by dawn into a shape he would use one day in a film to convey unavoidable longing.

  It was very early and the studio car waited outside in the Chaoyang district of Beijing. The driver was tough-looking and wore a gold link bracelet that seemed too loose to stay on.

  There was little traffic, and the city was soon far behind in a cloud of yellow-and-gray smoke. The driver’s clear flask of tea tilted as the car pulled around corners. Longwei did not speak to the driver, but tried to imagine his life from the details that stood out to him.

  The flight to Zurich landed early. It was a short runway, so the pilot had to slow the aircraft quickly. Longwei had slept for a few hours and dreamed he was a boy on vacation with his family in Hangzhou. In the dream, lake fishermen drifted home through evening currents, steering their narrow boats under footbridges. The water was soft and bright. There were real memories sewn into the fabric of the dream: Longwei’s father walking ahead on his own, then turning to look at them all from a distance, as though he were a ghost remembering happiness.

  They lived then in a hutong alley community, where his father sold vegetables on a corner.

  After a short flight to Mallorca from Switzerland, Longwei was met by the senior manager of a private villa where he planned to finish his latest screenplay, Tai Chi Flaming Fist. It was the sequel to his last film, Shao Lin Pirate Monks: Revenge of the Grasshopper.

  The manager spoke several languages, but Mandarin was not one of them. Longwei noticed his expensive shirt, strong hands, and other details that suggested the man had once been a soldier.

  Once outside the city of Palma, the two-lane road gradually narrowed to a dark strip that wound through the mountains. Villages had been whittled into the rock above, and stone houses dotted hillsides of wild, rough grasses.

  Longwei considered Europe a living museum as it had come to terms with its past. His wife loved Paris and they often travelled there together—though after a while, Longwei would miss coffee-flavored tea, red bean buns, and the colorful sweep of ballroomers in Tiantan park. He hadn’t considered Mallorca, until one of the studio heads in Beijing told him about a luxurious villa outside the village of Deia, perfect for writing and solitude.

  Over the next few days, Longwei ate in the kitchen with the house-chef and read international newspapers. He swam in the pool, then lay in the shade listening to birds, watching them drop in arcs from tall trees and fly out over the water.

  He switched off the air-conditioning in his room, and slept on top of his covers with the windows open.

  For almost a week, Longwei did not look at his script, nor make any notes on the story. The staff at the house found him easy to please but couldn’t tell if he was happy. He called his wife at strange hours, and was surprised by late-night burlesque scenes on the German or Dutch television channels.

  He had met his wife in Ningbo at a crowded railway station. They were both sixteen. She worked in a factory and her mother and father worked there too, though at mealtimes she would sit with her friends.

  One afternoon, while Longwei was exploring the gardens of the villa, he took a steep hillside path down to the bay.

  There were many sheep, and they stopped eating to watch him pass. In some tall, dry grasses, he noticed a young lamb. Its mother was licking the wet skin. The lamb had no fur and its legs were shaking. Longwei wandered if eating meat would be considered barbaric by future generations.

  There was no one around when he reached the sea. It was rocky but the water was calm. He took off all his clothes and swam naked for the first time since he was a boy. His body looked small and white, and made Longwei think of the pearl earrings his wife kept in a blue velvet case. He wondered if there were fish swimming near that he couldn’t see, or if a current would carry him into deeper water. He pictured his wife on the rocks wearing sunglasses, then heard her voice telling him to come in.

  AFTER A WEEK at the villa, the manager showed Longwei the location of two ancient stone lookouts called miradors. He explained that people had once stood guard there, keeping watch for invading fleets. The next day, Longwei visited them on his own. Each mirador was so high on the cliffs, and the wind so strong and incessant, that the silence descending seemed holy, as though one could be cleansed by a violent experience of solitude.

  There must have been periods, Longwei told the house-chef over dinner, when for whole generations nothing at all happened, and so the act of keeping watch would have become a sort of ritual meditation.

  He imagined how the Mallorcan villagers must have taken turns in these ancient stone parapets, from which hundreds of miles of open water could be swallowed in a single glance. Many would have fallen asleep, especially on windless, star-filled nights.

  The chef was interested in what Longwei was saying, and wondered how the stars must have looked before electric light came to the island.

  When he cut the fruit for dessert, Longwei described the small mountains of bitter melon, celery, bok choy, and cabbage that used to fill the back of his father’s Shanghai Forever tricycle.

  At the end of almost two weeks at the villa, Longwei decided to write something new and leave his unfinished screenplay in the Goyard duffel his wife bought him in Cannes as a late birthday present. T
he pattern on the bag reminded Longwei of Islamic architecture: the intricate, deliberate repetition without beginning or end, an intelligence beyond human understanding.

  Shooting for Tai Chi Flaming Fist was scheduled to begin late autumn in Ningbo, then wrap up in Beijing two months later.

  It was a huge budget, and the studio wanted casting decisions as soon as possible, with big stars in the lead roles, and of course Longwei’s usual grand fight scenes to ensure success in the provinces and overseas market.

  After almost three weeks in Mallorca, Longwei called his wife in the middle of the night to ask about the weather in Beijing. She felt sorry for her husband, because he was far away and needed her in a way he couldn’t admit. But she had been married to him a long time, and knew that loneliness was part of his creative process.

  Longwei eventually confessed to her that Tai Chi Flaming Fist was no longer the film he wanted to make; even the sight of the script on his desk at the villa, filled him with despair and boredom. His wife worried what the studio would say, but Longwei reassured her that it was the beginning of a new way for him as an artist, and that his old films seemed somehow thin to him now and relied too heavily on things he knew people would pay to see, but which had no deeper significance.

  Longwei told his wife that the next picture he made would be a sort of comedy, based on the people he had known growing up in the hutong community in Beijing. The action would not come from fist or foot—but from memory, and the struggle to keep hold of our lives.

  His wife asked if it would be a love story, reminding Longwei how they found each other as teenagers at the railway station. She asked if he remembered the night markets, and they laughed about sharing single bags of Ningbo fried batter, so their hands might accidentally touch.

  It was almost five A.M. when they finished talking. The garden outside Longwei’s room was coming back as night drained. He lay there going over their honeymoon in Hokkaido. The tops of mountains like white fists.

  His new film would be like his very first film. The one he made with a handheld camera at the Ningbo night market as a teenager. He would sit down and let the story write itself from start to finish, then send in the script without telling the studio what it meant. There would be an uproar, he knew that: people screaming, bottles of Johnnie Walker Blue Label hurled as men and women lost face with studio heads.