American Genius: A Comedy

by Lynne Tillman

  I like the kitchen helper's legs and his clear skin. He has good color. I have a strong sense of design and color, as my father did, but when I was young, I didn't want to go into his business, though by the time he sold it, over my protests, like the house I loved, I contemplated joining him and my uncle, since looking at weaves and warps and studying color combinations satisfies me in ways other activities don't. I like history, but it is slow. I am fast and quickly lose interest in things, and some people, and this dismays me, but I start and stop many reasonable pursuits. If I travel, I often take in where I am quickly and want to be somewhere else, though I'm aware that once in another place, I will feel similarly, so being where I am now, which I have come to not for the first time, isn't for the sake of novelty, but rather for a less novel form of discovery or a pursuit of knowledge that requires my foreswearing certain adventures that might take me far from myself, but I find it almost impossible to quit my mental meanderings, though I've arrived with a goal and want to make headway, like a person sailing in life toward a destination, hoping for accomplishment. I haven't a passion for one thing only. I vacillate and gain or lose enthusiasm, and like a Don Juan might in love, I'm lost to the singular pursuit, disappointed that nothing is compelling enough, that I lose interest, or always want something else or more to sustain it. But mostly I lose my way to it because I'm easily distracted, the way another resident did. He stayed a short time, as he was permanently adrift, since nothing fully animated him or gave him reason to live, and he said he would have wanted to have been a philosopher, since it was a calling, he told me, higher than any other except the priesthood, if he'd had the concentration or the energy. But instead he learned and mastered carpentry and became a devoted member of his church choir. He also muttered once that he was beginning to enjoy the luxury of impotence, something I'd never heard a man claim before or since, and, when he did, he gazed into the distance over my head. I thought I understood his melancholy, since it could have been like my own, though not about that type of impotence, but he also seemed foolish gazing into the distance, assuming a pose that might indicate a depth he didn't actually possess. It was an attempt, though, to signify the pursuit or impossibility of headway. But, then, I'm also aware that I may encounter a person who could change my life or an idea that could undo others I hold dear, which was reinforced by the card reader, and I want to believe his prophesy, and I do think that, while destinies are not carved in stone, I have a fate, that which has already been written, not alone by me but by forces bigger than myself, like an ocean's mindless waves, since I believe that about the most important things in life human beings don't have much choice. I am making do, unmaking too, being as watchful and free as I can with what I've been horn into.

  I have certain choices after breakfast and before lunch; for example, I could go back to bed, or, if energetic, I might tackle a pressing problem and find its solution, though my optimism dissipates as hours go by when I don't generally find a solution or answer to questions I pose myself, ones that challenge or haunt me. Then a minute elongates and seems greater than it is, during which I might accomplish nothing, time plodding on a barren highway, or time contracting, when, for instance, I haven't noticed anything except what's in front of me, a pair of scissors or a book, so I haven't felt aware of being alive, sad or happy, and big hours become tiny minutes, and I don't know, in the most prosaic sense, where time has gone. No one knows where time's gone, and it may be that there's no time, only the peculiar, winsome present, in which I seem to be alive, though I can also feel dead, like a diseased tree in the forest outside my picture window, which I watch as a season mutates infinitesimally, except when there is a sudden frost and buds die or a great wind chases all the leaves off a tree. But the dying tree I'm watching now hasn't changed like that. I've watched several seasons change here, and no one ever knows where time has gone, but to me it's in the faces of the people on the wall of my room who are gone, whose expressions never change, and because of that no time exists. I've heard that truth is the daughter of time, and on the slowest days, when I can hear the clock tick, and my heart, my second stomach, beat nervously, and nothing I've eaten satisfies me, and I don't know what to do with myself, I can fantasize I'm time's daughter, or believe I'm the Count's, but not my father's or my mother's, because when I was a child and nothing pleased me, when I didn't know what to do with myself, I blamed them for the lack of steady excitement, when I also didn't recognize temporariness or finality.

  Leslie Van Houten's parents divorced, and neither of them could have predicted her choosing Manson's family over their amicably separated one, but she did, when she was nineteen, she came under his spell, though not as completely as some of the other girls, and she has been in jail for a long time, and will be kept there much longer, though she's become a model prisoner, teaches other prisoners, has received a college degree, works on the prison newspaper, and could care for herself on the outside. At Leslie Van Houten's 1991 parole hearing, her eighth, she wore a black and white checked cotton dress, a bold print, with a wide, white collar, and white trim on its short sleeves, a dress like a house, too large for her, so that though she was tall and big boned, she was dwarfed by the dress, an unfashionable one that might create the impression she was an administrator in a small midwestern company. Leslie answered the three parole commissioners' questions in defense of her suitability to leave prison after twenty-two years. She clarified, as she had before, that she'd wiped off their fingerprints to look busy, so that she wouldn't be asked to mutilate Mr. and Mrs. LaBianca, as Charlie wanted them to do, as Tex might have required of her, Tex might have asked her to do more, also, she said, and, when they were leaving, they took cheese and chocolate milk from the refrigerator. She believed in Charlie, did what he asked, and before they left the car to break into an anonymous middle-class suburban house, owned by the unsuspecting LaBiancas, he ordered them "to all do something." It was like war, Leslie said. To her, then, Manson was Jesus Christ, and sometimes she read him passages from the Bible, but now when she reads the Bible, with her minister, she must push away that pernicious memory, to forgive herself for her terrible acts, which, after three years in prison, she began to recognize and for which she developed a strong sense of responsibility, but which, it appears, was absent before then, and for which she must now seek and allow herself some sort of peace, even forgiveness.

  The right to pursue happiness sends me and other Americans, even here where we are meant to resist outside temptation, on a hunt for it. If I'm not hungry, I might seek other forms of happiness, or pleasure, which is part of my American birthright, though the most misconceived of them or the most difficult to realize; I can pursue several means and ways to be happy, if I am able to forget what makes me habitually sad. The woman who hates me or may not hate me, since she abandoned all of her friends, must believe she has embarked upon a truly new life, but I wonder how she narrates its many divorces, more than just from her first and second husbands, by whom she had several children, since she has excised the past as if she were an immigrant and it the old country, with a language she no longer speaks. She was an expert horsewoman. Does she still ride? My own scale is teased by such questions, which I can't restrain, and then, overtaken by cloudy intangibles, I might walk to my bedroom and go to sleep after breakfast, feeling smaller. Without looking at it, I easily forget my appearance, and my body can feel gigantic, but also not sturdy enough, or when I feel small, my scale reduced by puny conjecture, I could be a mole, my skin pulling and drawing, prickly, demanding that I shed it and everything else, too, to begin again in a common but unique American fantasy of life as an entirely different person with a virgin's body, whose hymen, a membrane of thin skin protecting an essential orifice that, once penetrated, effects a change whose connotations defy it a single definition, and is also just another frontier. Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that "waves" of human movement westward defined the character of the American nation, an idea mostly disputed if not discredited now, b
ut which held sway for a time, though when teaching it, I focused mostly on a single aspect: "In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave, the meeting point between savagery and civilization." I told my high school seniors, after I'd banished myself from college teaching, that our American civilization can be treated as a series of periods of its individual colonists or members overcoming their own savagery, and because of this the American character retains a roughness and crudeness unlike the European or other civilizations. The students didn't like my interpretation of the Frontier Thesis, and felt indicted by it, but I included myself, I told them, and didn't mind being compared with so-called savages or animals, which we were, too, and insisted on a nation's theoretical similarity to a fetus's development, in which ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, except, in the case of the American political and social body, the fetus is born over or born again, and the infant introduced into a new context, but without advancement, repeats it all. Not long after Turner published his paper, which he delivered first as a lecture in the 1893 World's Fair, the Viennese architect and designer Adolf Loos, in his essay "Crime and Ornament," used a similar ontological argument: "In the womb the human embryo goes through all phases of development the animal kingdom has passed through." Loos compared ornamentation with criminality and degeneracy: "The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from objects of everyday use." The relationship between Turner and Loos marked a moment when thinking about American history and international art and design collided, at least theoretically, at the beginning of the 20th century, often called the American Century, and is the subject of another of my partially written essays, "Backward Movements in the Modern." "We," Loos wrote, "have the art that superseded ornament." And, "those who go about in velvet jackets today are not artists, but clowns or housepainters." I like velvet. Hubris and vanity hold hands with so-called progress, as well as with advances, innovation, and invention, so Loos's words haunt me, as do Turner's, because a mistake or failed idea can also detonate the imagination, since it may explode a period's codes or unconscious habits and actions better than its successes, and much erupts from the erroneous. In Vienna, a city I visited with a friend whose accidental death I still can't accept, often I stare at him in photographs, but also, more often, I don't let myself and, instead, walk to the main house, fancying he will be waiting like a letter, though I know he won't, just one of the disconsolate women, who vacillates as I do and doesn't get done what she should, or the woman with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, who will be reclining on a couch reading or sleeping, my dead friend and I took an architectural tour. Walking about in the old, stately city, with its terrible, grand history, we hung on the words of our impassioned guide, while snow fell, the city's first snowstorm in years, which coated us and it in white, my friend, whose mother's ancestors had been slaves in Mississippi, pointed to the blizzarded sky and whispered impishly into my ear, "I think it's telling us something." The gentlemanly guide tutored us on Vienna's place in architecture, art, and design, which reached its apex during the time Freud also lived there, at the start of the 20th century, and much of what the guide taught-dates and names-I've forgotten, though I remember we took him for pastries and coffee in a capacious coffeehouse where he sipped from a white cup, and my friend tipped him generously. Our guide accepted the money modestly, but most of what my dead friend said to me during those days is lost.

  There is nothing more satisfying than sleeping whenever or wherever you want, in a bedroom that is yours alone, removing your clothes, throwing off the weight of the world and sliding under the inviting clean covers of a bed that is also yours alone, to fall into a blissful, ignorant sleep, to wallow in unconsciousness, when nothing else exists, when nothing disturbs your peace, except dreams, when you are left to yourself, since no one expects anything of you when you are sleeping. A bed whose mattress is firm, whose laundered all-cotton pillowcases smell of flowers, whose good cotton sheets have been washed with detergents that don't irritate the skin, comes close to heaven on earth, and nothing is better than to sleep in this circumstance and forget everything and everyone, without trying to forget or knowing you are forgetting.

  During her parole hearing, Leslie Van Houten defended herself and her lawyer also defended her, arguing that twenty-two years in prison was enough time for her crime, that the California matrix, which defines sentencing guidelines or parameters, was served by her having been punished for those twenty-two years, that she was a model prisoner, that she was attending to her drinking and drug problems, and was drugfree since 1983. The psychologist's report agreed she was no longer a threat to society, she presented no threat to anything or anyone, and should be given every consideration for parole. But the prosecutor, the same one who prosecuted her and the Manson family twenty-two years before, argued Leslie Van Houten should never get out of jail, that her crimes were horrible, that society doesn't want her out, that she can do good in prison for the rest of her life. Something inside her, he argued, will always cause her to fall off the wagon.

  Trouble for the day could include the male kitchen helper whose sly winks and glances remind me of other sly glances, especially at the beach in the summer, when I was a teenager and dreaded going to the pool in my tank suit, my budlike breasts shaping the material to my body in ways that might provoke notice; though once I'd loved the ocean and the beach, suddenly, between the years of twelve and thirteen, these loves were compromised by other so-called natural phenomena, also greater than myself. I tugged at the straps of my navy blue suit, making sure it covered my small bottom, but the cherry on the back of my leg was visible to everyone, especially the little boys I'd gone to grade school with who had suddenly shot up a foot, whose pudgy bodies were now lean, whose rib cages protruded, whose faces were decorated with red spots, whose company was once easy to be in but now wasn't. They could see me exposed. The ocean was far from the pool, when once it was close, and to get there I'd choose circuitous routes to maintain invisibility. The kitchen helper is like the boys I went to school with, and I can easily be the same age as he in my mind, where much of the past resides, resistant and patchy, and this analogy could produce trouble; still, if I've forgotten something I need for lunch, like mustard or olive oil, if I want to make lunch last, prolonging its conclusion with an excursion, I must go to the kitchen. But I might meet some of the other residents, who, like myself, always want something.

  Possession is nine-tenths of the law, what's contained in houses or worn on bodies, what people claim as theirs, what they fight for in court often are possessions. A lust for ownership is telling, some seem incapable of denying themselves, though it's regularly insisted that the only thing we possess is our bodies, a weird consumable to me who often feels not in it, but also we are expected, in death, to leave our bodies, and exhorted that the body doesn't matter, only the soul or spirit. On her stolid body, Leslie's bold print dress dated or outdated her, since fashion bends time, style is a timekeeper, and many people dress stylishly, to feel present or vital, though in a year or less what was new is old, and they are older too, and in photographs only five years old, everyone looks out of time, like the changed styles they wear, since fashion is a futile method to remain vital or timeless, but even futility demands change, there are new styles of it, also, but submission to some method is necessary, along with creepy death. Still, I don't like to change my outer gear, though I do, not to appear mad, out of time, like Richard II, but when I like something, I don't want to have to renounce it arbitrarily unless I'm weary of it, so often I buy many copies of a style or design I like and am indignant when, for instance, the shoes I prefer are taken off the market to make way for a similar, inferior model, because of fashion and commerce. One pair, Italian heeled sandals with straps that crossed over the arch, showed my foot off better than any pair I have ever had since, and no one makes them anymore. I hope to buy something that might become a classic, a simple design, like the Eames chairs or tennis shoe, so I won't have to change, espec
ially into an inferior model, most people can't change, but styles represent change and also propagate the illusion of change, they distract from mortality, especially most feverishly in changing rooms, where women and girls say, Does this look good? and while textiles are as old as the need for shelter, they are somewhat freer of the taint of style, even though textiles have changed radically over time and because of it. But there are still four basic materials and synthetics, to which I am irrationally attached.