American Genius: A Comedy

by Lynne Tillman

  In India, the delicate thread for the famed Dacca muslin was produced by revolving needle-thin pieces of bamboo in a coconut shell. I'd like to have a coconut shell machine, keep it on a table to regard with wonder, and one day take it apart bit by bit. When architects designed all aspects of a house, including its couches, chairs and tables, wallpaper and rugs, Frank Lloyd Wright regularly used natural fibers for his interiors, taffeta, mohair, goat's hair satin, he and other likeminded architects in the early 20th century favored handcrafted fabrics. But his chairs were straight-backed, heavy, and rigid, he didn't cherish comfort or consider supporting the lower back, but not long after in Europe Marcel Breuer and Gerrit Rietveld did, and Le Corbusier and the Eameses more than any of them. Curtains and drapes go in and out of style, venetian blinds and shades, fabric hanging on walls is art or craft, and any long-held attachment to a style marks its advocate as a zealot. So it's said that it's important to change with the times, whose effects are thrust upon people, anyway, when, for instance, they can't buy a pair of shoes they loved that has gone out of style in a year, so about this perpetual motion toward change I'm dubious, since how do you know when it's time to stop, I usually don't know when to stop, I'm merely projected into the future.

  Irrationality incites futures that are unknown but in some sense already spoken, though reason is trotted out, like a winning racehorse, to predict the unknown for our admiration. But it's the wild stallion, the uncapturable horse, I cherish, it can't help itself. I understand coming under a spell, because I have with men and women, and I might again, and if people tell their messy truths, the way the daughter of time mustI wonder what the son of time must tell, if not the truth, if like the Count he merely keeps its instruments or guards and hoards it-or if he is profligate like my brother and wastes it, the way he wastes himself, the way my mother said he does, somewhere in Cincinnati, they might say that, at a certain period in their lives, they couldn't help themselves, they were captives to someone else, they didn't know who they were anymore, or why. On occasion, when nothing else occurs to me, and it is quiet, as it is this late morning, while I await lunch and nothing stirs in the room but myself, I might ask: Is there a principle worth dying for? Would you intercede in a fight that wasn't yours? Do you think people get more or less what they deserve? Can you tell a difficult truth? Where does your most persistent hope lie? Do you expect your life to stay as it is? Do you rely on surprise to make you happy? Are you disappointed? Do you keep it to yourself? Do you have many secrets? Has something happened that you'd never tell anyone? Have you ever done something too horrible to mention? How many times?

  The woman who's no longer my friend may dislike me, and I can't know for sure the reasons for her alienation, I can only guess at them. I like some friends less and less, when their bad or good habits stop being charming. I once left a man and didn't have a reason, then I fell under the spell of another, but I can't gather up in a basket the waxings and wanings of my affections, toward men and women, people have come and gone, I come and go, but if I could count up everyone in my life, I might be better prepared to leave it, knowing its erratic sums and scores, though my theory is disputable. I dispute it regularly, as when, for instance, I take an object apart and look at its innards scattered on the floor without sense, or when I labor to achieve nonsense. Lately I've been remembering the first time I had sex, an incomplete, unsatisfactory act, he was years older and confused, as confused by one as I was by doing it, as I would have said then, and I recall the night but not him vividly. I rejected him soon after, without any subtlety or concern for him, as had as the sex was. Any passion is better than none, I remind myself.

  Lunch is eaten alone in the room that isn't for sleeping, and like breakfast and dinner, there is a rotation of menus, so that every two weeks the kitchen helpers might place tunafish, cheese, or egg salad sandwiches, for the vegetarians who eat fish and who are not lactose intolerant, in the bags, or a spinach pie, there is a variety of salads, carrots, celery, beets, tomatoes, romaine lettuces, hummus and other dips for the raw food, steak or roast beef sandwiches for the meat-eaters, and many kinds of soup, creamy mushroom, beef and barley, chicken, vegetable, and all of these may be in your lunch hag depending upon preferences and dietary needs, and there is dessert, freshly baked cookies or cakes, though the vegetarians complain that their desserts are less luscious than the meateaters', but there is fruit for everyone, and, especially when it is in season, fruit is delicious. Some invite others to join them. I never do, because lunch would resemble breakfast, with a similar cast of characters, and it could further damage my day, since the presence of others is capable of disrupting whatever headway I aspire to make. Occasionally, I want the Count to join me, his stories and mystery don't seem diversionary, there are rumors spread about his eccentric and illustrious past, about his wife, who might have been murdered or is a hermit, about his belief that human history's two best inventions are time and reason, but he is asleep at noon, at rest in timeless dreams. So I keep the lunch hour to myself, open for whatever occurs to me, and to eat it when and how I want. Each time lunch arrives, I decide I won't look inside the brown paper bag in which it's brought, to sustain interest in its contents, even enrich the mystery and future pleasure it might contain, to maintain a lively desire, desire is life, for the meal that is usually the poorest of the day.

  Today I heard the boy on the bicycle when often I don't, and instead of greeting the long-legged kitchen helper, I remained in my compromised chair and pretended not to notice how he placed the hag on the steps to my door, which was partly open, because I like fresh air or fear suffocation. Instantly, as he rode away, I regretted my decision, since he has beautiful eyes, long legs, and a sly smile, but if I engaged his smile, if I looked into his eyes, I might face an unruly element in my future. Lunch today was poor. It included an egg salad sandwich. I like eggs and don't subscribe to the contested dictum that eggs are harmful, the way many do, but I'd had eggs for breakfast, as did many of the others; there was also a sickeningly sweet apple juice and a thin tomato soup with spaghetti, cold, though it was in a thermos, soups always are, so it was surprising, but maybe the top of the thermos hadn't been screwed on tightly enough, yet when it is, I often can't open it. I like soup. Everyone could eat the tomato soup, unless the person was macrobiotic, disavowing the tomato for being too yin, one of a group designated as deadly nightshade, or someone was allergic to tomatoes or disliked tomato soup or felt, as I have felt, that it tasted like blood. I have, on occasion, alone and in company, choked on the clotted juice, though curiously, I can enjoy the taste of tomato soup, with cream or without, overcoming my initial visceral disgust to it, and even to the clotted juice, by substituting the mental idea that it tastes good or by repeating the phrase "it tastes good" to myself silently over and over. The tomato soup was suitable for almost all of the diets offered: low fat, dairy-free and vegetarian, dairy-free and meat eating, fish-eating vegetarian, non-red meat but not vegetarian and not dairy-free, anti-candida, and other plans. The head cook tries to find tasty, winning recipes or ways to use leftovers from dinner that all of us can eat, but in working to please or accommodate the residents all of her years here she has mostly been unsuccessful, especially as their requests for different diets has increased and residents' sensitivities to the world around them-the air they breathe, the objects they touch, the materials on the floor or on the walls--and their resistances to the many products human beings have invented to ease the stress of life have grown exponentially. During the time I have been in residence, which will extend into the future I have scant curiosity about, though I know it will be, in some ways, dissimilar from today and could be charged with potent events I would never have predicted, but which in some ways I hope for, because excitement can't be predicted, the cook has become uneasier, more frustrated by or unwilling to cater to the residents' demands, since they have blossomed in variety, vociferousness, and even self-righteousness, and she, like the Polish woman, wearies, exasperated.
A flash of movement charges through her rail-thin body or a crease streaks across her startlingly pale forehead, deepening the line already engraved there, and she might quickly move to the sink or cross to the stove, where a pot is always nestled and steam always rises, to avoid a resident's need of her compassion.

  The Polish woman sometimes winces when the telephone rings, which, because she is alone in the salon, she has to answer, forcing her to abandon me, lying under a soft pink or blue blanket with cream on my face, and this affects her schedule, since there may be another customer waiting, though only once was it the lusting man, but I continue to expect him, or even hope he'll return, because the prospect is exciting, especially his presence, dark and brooding, and her response to him, whether she will allow him to have her or not, or continue to keep him waiting until it's the right time for her, since she may lust for him, or maybe she takes greater satisfaction in attenuating her rejection of him. She might be delaying, even playing with him, and I could be resting on the couch inside the walls of the salon at the moment she finally tells him. But then what would happen. Sometimes the Polish woman expels a breath fraught with resentment, addressing some of what she omits in our routine conversations, but I don't think she would refer to herself as sensitive, the way my mother wouldn't.

  I might throw the tomato soup into the toilet, since, with no one here to see it, I could easily do that, though I have qualms about doing it, even alone, when no one would see me. I dislike any self-enforced prohibition, but even an unimportant act might have consequences impossible to foresee, or problems I couldn't predict, since there are always problems, and some are surprises. People have become more sensitive over the years. Obesity, allergies, and food aversions have spread like wild flowers do in spring and summer over Virginia's countryside, which has the greatest number and variety in the U.S., belying the countryside's otherwise homogeneous genetic human population, though there are always differences among people. The environment, a word I find somewhat objectionable because it's bland but whose use is endemic and impossible to ignore or avoid, has become more poisonous, or toxic, and there are new viruses and diseases dotting the human field, while old ones disappear, and allergies and sensitivities may be the onset of still unknown, more virulent plagues, as this is the time Stephen Jay Gould named "the age of bacteria," when "maximal bacterial simplicity" dominates man or humans. The unknown is conveniently, conventionally, more virulent than the known, and it is exciting, which is why some people think about the future, since it might also, in addition to what life always is, be new, though I'm not very interested in what will come after me, but I can imagine becoming less inured to it just before I die, since I won't be able to have and see it, and the inability to know it will probably provoke a profound desire to live.

  People who once ate in restaurants and drank at bars with smokers now refuse to or can't-they claim to be allergic to smoke and subject to pulmonary distress as well as skin irritations-when not long ago, few were allergic to cigarettes, although a rise in asthma and emphysema might have been the harbingers of this new allergy. My skin doctor told me that in the 1960s he treated three cases of a disease, purpura, which afflicted young women only, but he has never seen a case since. The phenomenon was that blood pooled at parts of their bodies, typically at their extremities, so that great purple swollen blotches formed at their lower forearms, and though the women were tested in every conceivable way, there was no organic basis found for the occurrence, and the disease crippled them when it commenced. Just before the onset of an episode, they would have a premonitory sensation, a tingling which always preceded, by five minutes, the appearance of the purple blotches. It was characteristic of this Autoerythrocyte Sensitization Syndrome, whose diagnostic feature was that if you spun down a sample of the sufferer's blood and injected the red blood cells, characteristic hemorrhagic or bleeding lesions developed. One young woman was hospitalized, and every test given, and after some of her symptoms were alleviated and upon being told she would be released, since they could do no more for her and she'd improved, marginally, at that very instant, she became paralyzed, as her mind and body were likely stymied by this turn of events and found another route to manifest her relentless distress, and for the first and only time in my dermatologist's career, he called in a hypnotist, who put the woman in a trance during which the hypnotist suggested that she could walk, that when she awoke from the trance, she would walk, and, that very day, when she awoke, she was no longer paralyzed and walked out of the hospital. My dermatologist has never heard of her again, and has not seen a case like it since the I960s, so the disease or condition has disappeared, just as it appeared, suddenly, to represent some question or challenge, a neurosis, that a very few young women manifested in their bodies, since the mind is part of the body and changes frequently. I change my mind often, too many times to count, deciding I must walk to town, or read the history of the Empire State Building, listen restlessly to music, dance, doodle a design for a metal teapot, memorize some Zulu words, or sometimes I dwell on the faces of friends who have died or on conversations that were conclusive, ending friendships or sealing them, robbing the of certainty or teaching me trust, inconclusive and eternally titillating, the way romance is, especially an unfulfilled one, which may be why I can't concentrate as much as I want, to make headway, though the tarot card reader assured me I will overcome something that has been insurmountable, which I haven't yet recognized and that taunts me daily. When I'm in love, I am hard put to think about anything else, but I'm not in love now, in that way, though it can be said I have loved and may love again. Still, lunch is often a lonely affair, though generally I'm glad to eat it by myself, not pestered by the demanding man, whose great appetite for attention expands like a stomach, whether it's fed or empty, and if he could he'd gobble up and devour everyone's time in a banquet for himself.

  If lunch includes a salad, romaine lettuce and tomato, shredded carrots and sliced cucumber, to stave off eating it, I toss the ingredients into an ugly, plastic howl and make a dressing for it in a plain water glass, but often I don't have what's necessary for a good dressing, like mustard, and then I must decide if I want to walk to the main house, barge into the kitchen, bother the kitchen helpers, especially the young man who likes to glance slyly at me, the girl who transgressed the rules, or the cook or assistant cook, who may or may not be there, and ask for the missing ingredient. I will be considered bothersome, a pest, too picky, and difficult. But to he picky necessitates putting on shoes, a jacket and scarf, switching off all the lights, and making sure the fire is out, so often I can't decide, annoyed at myself for not having remembered what I would need from the kitchen while at breakfast, but then I'm not thinking about lunch when I rush away from the bustling, often tension-ridden dining room as quickly as possible, to avoid trouble.

  Yesterday, after a midday meal of tunafish, pickles and low-fat vichyssoise, I walked to the library. Everyone here can use the library, which is a simple, four-story brick building, with four large, similar rooms, three of which have chairs, benches, and tables, and one, a piano, lutes, two acoustic guitars, and chess sets. There is an empty birdcage in each room, a golf set and tennis racquets in one, a few sweaters near the fireplaces in all four, where mementos from former residents dot the rooms, and in three of the rooms, dark wood shelves are crammed with forgotten novels and poetry, an abundance of manuals, especially on fly fishing, cookbooks, how-to books, outdated encyclopedias, and musty dictionaries. Some people from the nearby town are permitted, if they have been issued visitors' cards, to use the library, though most don't, and occasionally I have run into one when I have gone in search of a hook that might help me. Yesterday, a disheveled, elderly woman emerged from the library's bathroom and inquired, brusquely, "Are you a teacher?" I told her I had taught American history and furniture and interior design occasionally, and then she asked, inserting herself into my day, "That's good, but do you have a man?" Quickly, I had to decide whether I'd answer her impertinen
t question, but then I wanted to, if only to see what might transpire, because I'm curious, lunch hadn't been exciting, pickles and tunafish are laughable, and I hope for novelty. I restrained myself from asking, Can you have a man? and instead answered:

  -I did, recently.

  -Dumb women don't have men.

  -You really think that?

  -Well, sometimes it's smart women who don't have men-

  -How can you tell anyway?

  -I'm not a mind reader.

  -That's a relief.

  -But I read. All my books burned in a fire, so I come here. I have good eyes. I can see what other people don't. Don't let that scare you.

  Now the odd woman smiled, brushed off her tatty skirt and straightened her shoulders, all of which was appealing, because she had found a necessity to relate to me, another character, with some severity, and the encounter drew something from her, so she looked at me solemnly and announced:

  -You have to use your time wisely, and then there's always chance.