American Genius: A Comedy Page 15

  After lunch, I sometimes take a walk, it's good to get exercise, but I dislike exercise for its own sake, and the fire is still burning. I'm reluctant to throw water on it, because later it might be harder to start another, when the ash is wet, the floor of the fireplace damp, but I'm reluctant to leave it burning, because it might consume the place where I make and unmake things or do nothing, which is mine for a short while and on whose walls I've affixed photographs, to remind me of my friends, as well as places I've never been and places I've been, where I may want to return. Some of my friends are smiling, some not, some will never be anywhere again but in photographs, and their weight burdens me. It is disagreeably stuck in me like undigested food, so I walk closer to their pictures, whose lack of animation might be undone or upset by my movement toward them, but they are always dead. Of a mountain's treacherousness, a bad heart, a brain tumor, a murder, AIDS, cancer, a car crash. On another wall are photographs of friends' well-fed, bright children, who are amply encouraged but who will anyway have problems and may one day turn against their parents, who can't help themselves, have tried their best and probably won't deserve their enmity, though people live with the consequences of their actions. No one can foretell the events that will have weight in a young child's life, which also incites anxious parents to more worry, but then most things in a child's life can't be accounted for, and they will remember almost nothing that happens before the age of three, four, even five. From the time I learned to count and read, when I read or heard a number, I saw a color, and when I heard or read the word for a color, or saw a color, I registered its numerical value and equivalent. Orange four, black ten, white one, red five, purple nine, blue eight, powder blue three, pink three, yellow two or three, depending upon how light, muted, or bold it was. The elements had weight, numerically, and shades and hues of color. Numbers and colors were figures in my imagination that fused into patterns about which I never spoke, though in some way it helped the world make sense, as things added up in my young mind. But the weight of death is heavier, there is no scale for it, and I shove it into a corner, where it lies, an insurmountable lump, threatening to spread its ugliness.

  The Polish woman's salon is near where I normally live, an easy walk, and one I know so well I may no longer actually see where I'm going, but at least I'm unaware of exercising, unless I force myself to think about it, but then if I do, I also think about how little I actually exercise and that I'm hastening my end or allowing for a more difficult old age, though I'm reluctant to acknowledge I'm aging, that death's around a corner, while I also know that I'm dying and think about death daily, like a prayer I'm expected to repeat. Not taking exercise may hasten my end, or final rest, though it's not rest, just a nothing and something we can't know, but maybe thinking that is restful. Also I'm lazy, impatient, and dislike pain, though my dentist and a physical therapist have told me I have a high threshold for it, which also doesn't surprise me. I have watched people who are exercising, grimacing and grunting, especially when lifting weights or contorting themselves into peculiar shapes that are hard to achieve and hold, but many enjoy their effort, they may enjoy effort itself, as it makes them feel they're accomplishing a goal and also effort could make them feel alive. Many people don't feel alive.

  The Polish woman is a great one for exercise, exuding a heartiness of appetite, which I feel is repulsive and attractive, when I'm lying on the chaise lounge, covered in a soft pink or fuzzy blue blanket of one hundred percent cotton, as she ministers to me in her attentive way, though it is sometimes perfunctory, because she doesn't really care about me or my skin, it is of no genuine concern to her, and she doesn't think about me or it when I am not with her. Her healthy face can look bored or vacant, the emptiness of which is intriguing and unpleasant, though her skin is unlined and, like a rough linen, straddles her broad Slavic cheekbones. She has a light red mole perched close to the corner of her lip, and it is that area of excess on her face to which my eyes often return. She has no facial scars, none I have noticed, while she, sometimes known as an aesthetician, has, I imagine, noticed every imperfection on mine. Once or twice she has given me a massage and seen or felt all or most of the skin on my body, where she perhaps noticed the scar above my knee, which is an inch long and a quarter-inch wide. It's ugly, but it is not on my face, whose placement might have inflected the course of my life, I might not have gone out in company much or been considered in any way a desirable partner, for sex or dinner or even talk, if several deep scars covered my cheek, chin or forehead, if my face had been slashed to ribbons with a razor or knife. If the cat I put to death because it attacked me had clawed my face and not my calf, if the cat had clung to my face with its sharp nails the way it clung to my left leg, I would now have four depressions on my cheek or forehead, which would make me a less suitable partner in many situations, and some sensitive people, such as myself, would have to ignore the imperfections or never engage with a character that scarred. But instead the scars were carved into my calf when so much tissue oozed from my leg that small craters formed, whose depressions could not ever again be replenished, so much tissue was disgorged, and my left calf will never be normal or beautiful again, but forever marked by the action of an insane cat, who will always he remembered for that, as well as for the mystery of its animus toward me and my inability to quench or limit its unrepentant hatred or protect its deformed life, and if it had attacked my face, my life would have been changed.

  I like having a place to go toward, a direction consoles, and there are many places around here for escape. I could walk around the grounds and search for elusive deer or shy moles, I could stroll into town and have coffee in a cafe where local residents gather, or go at any time to the library where the odd inquisitive woman might await me, or wander around the local, historic cemetery, with its tombstones, graves or resting places, supposedly a sanctuary for the living, though for me this has never been true, as it is predicated-like some schemes and plots, whose repetitions advance an old story and make it appear inevitable-upon hoary untruths about eternity, since also life and death are repetitious, and if I know where I'm going, to town, to have a coffee or a tryst, to buy socks, and that I have a reason to go there, it doesn't feel like exercise. It's an adventure, even if the goal isn't exciting, but I become excited easily, like my father, when we drove to the Thanksgiving parade or returned to the fierce, gray-green ocean in winter, where he made me exercise, run along the sand to build up my calf muscles, one of which now has four indentations from the claws of my insane cat, but my father wasn't alive then. My everyday, unremarkable shoes are hidden from me, as I'd inadvertently located the spot most unlikely for them, but finally I discover them in the place I told myself I'd remember they'd be but didn't, slip them on and notice my all-cotton socks, which I like, because they were simple to buy. In the place where I grew up, girls and their mothers shopped relentlessly for clothes they didn't need but wanted, and I didn't ever want to join them, but sometimes went along, secretly dying because I was wasting time doing what I disliked, shopping and trying on clothes in too small rooms, where, awkwardly, women and girls undress and saleswomen ask them to come out and show them how the clothes look, or stand in larger rooms surrounded by other women and girls, strangers, who are undressed and then dressed, looking at themselves in mirrors, displaying expressions that betray avarice, despair, glee, and no one says anything except, Try this on, I don't like this, it's too big, small, tight, I like this, how much is it, and it's often better not to say anything at all. People have baker's dozens of yeasty, unspoken wants, they often especially want objects to make up for what they never had, and some ask for them, which makes them vulnerable, and those who never make demands may feel less vulnerable, but they are not, as they are hungry too, and unlikely to be fed, since they are afraid to ask for what they need. Sustained hunger must be worse than the discomfort of undigested food or the phantom pangs of unrequited love everyone suffers, but hardly anyone wants it known they do, since sometimes
it's better not to say anything. Some people want to feel hungry, women, especially, who can afford to eat well but who deny themselves, some even want to feel faint with hunger, because they become alive then, eating themselves alive. Spiritual people also want to feel hungry, they renounce and deny the flesh, along with the rest of the material world, and when they fast for a week, they become lightheaded and feel closer to a higher power, which in high and hallucinatory moments they may be.

  I buy one hundred percent cotton socks whenever I can, though often there's just a mix of eighty percent cotton and twenty percent nylon around, so I've mastered wearing this combination, adjusted to it, since it's healthy to be flexible, but many people aren't, and I, too, in my mind or especially my body, where habit and rigidity shape demands and inclinations, sometimes can't exhort myself to the plasticity or fluidity I know is good for my health, and often I think few would survive if war came and deprived them of what they thought was necessary. If they couldn't eat what they wanted here, many would be lost. Some fabric combinations are still better than others because better cotton is used, and the best thing about my father was how he touched material, how he let it drift through his adept fingers, while the expression on his face changed, his concentration attuning itself to the feel of the material, or when he looked through a small magnifying glass at a thread or weighed one on his golden machine, whose sharp needle could quickly pierce the skin on your finger. Socks can also scratch, but I have no worry about how they look or what they mean, though I accept they have some meaning, since nothing has no meaning, though some theologians think evil is nothing since a god wouldn't create it, but I dislike religion, since people are often promised a better life, a glorious afterlife, and worship deities who censor or condemn them to wretchedness on earth. Calvinism doesn't forgive its congregants, and most religions threaten those who don't subscribe to their beliefs, everyone suffers because of religion or from faith or the lack of faith. I don't know what to have faith in, except people, who are as irascible as the Bible's Jehovah, though not as omniscient.

  I'll wander into a store and casually buy a pair or two of socks. Jerry Lewis throws away socks after he wears them once, and I'd like to do that, because it may be wrong and is certainly indulgent, and also because doing laundry is repetitive, and throwing away socks makes less laundry, though I dislike washing dishes and doing laundry less than I did when I was younger, when everything imposed on me was a big waste of time, but now I'm not certain what's a waste of time, or what's nothing, since I may find something when not looking, and because time is all we have, inexplicably. Almost lackadaisically, I toss a pitcher of water onto the blazing fire, dousing it while explaining to myself the reasons I shouldn't have, because I'll have to deal with the aftermath later, but I do anyway, as it's urgent that I leave this room, a temporary shelter or refuge, though some people here refuse to accept temporariness, although it's all there is. A woman chained herself to her bed, a man boarded his door against intruders, and they were removed, forcibly, returned to their respective homes, and I can understand not resigning yourself to the inevitable, but I wouldn't tie myself to my bed, I don't think. The woman who chained herself there also sucked men's toes, and, at night, uninvited, though some left their doors unlocked, she entered their bedrooms, they'd awaken with her at their feet, their toes in her mouth, she was sucking greedily, and some were annoyed, but some enjoyed it, though they never admitted it. Some may have a phobia about all types of sucking, and the library's sex manual cites many fears I'd not heard of or that may be out of fashion, like "Clavestitism, a morbid desire to put on the dresses one wore in childhood," or "Syphilomania, an inclination to attribute all illness to syphilis," though "Venerophobia, a morbid fear of sexual intercourse" persists, and one night at dinner, following a lackluster day, I recited some of the more remote sexual fears to the table, and Spike, with her enthusiasm, ready laugh, and brilliant, long hair, who always liked talking about sex, though rarely had an opening, joined in, charged especially by hearing about "voice fetishism," of which the dictionary said: "The voice is one of the strongest sexual fetishes, many men actually fall in love with a voice, even with a voice heard over the telephone, and cannot free themselves from its spell." I understand coming under a spell, though I didn't expect in my case it was a voice that seduced me, but I could imagine it, and I didn't mention my thralldoms to anyone at the table, and only Spike spoke uninhibitedly about men's voices she grooved on, she said, and phone sex that the dictionary anticipated but didn't define, in which she engaged with her necessarily absent lover, but the demanding man's skin flared and darkened, the disconsolate women's faces sunk, the psoriatic character shoved her food almost off her plate, while the tall balding man smiled, though not at her, since blatancy might shriek his mating call, and I thought: I won't do this again. Although, in some way, to be honest, the way the daughter of time must be, their active disdain also satisfied me. Not long after, a Turkish man appeared, a translator and poet in need of a long rest and quiet-his commercial interests allowed him to write what he wanted and to travel, he owned a paper and carton factory-and he muttered to me before dinner that there should be more sex here, everywhere, and that I in particular should have more sex in everything. He was passionate about his beliefs, especially about translation, sex and sexlessness, and he and I would discuss this more soon enough.

  The town is two miles away, a reasonable distance for a walk, and it is also an oasis or a distraction, so I'm not trapped here, except with myself or by encounters with, for instance, the two young women, who have made my entering the main hall a problem; the staff, who subtly inquire if I'm making progress, did I enjoy the meeting, lecture, or session I attended, or the tall balding man, who, when he is alone might expound on his malaise, after he has run ten miles and smells rank, but is unaware of this, while his palms pool with sweat, the effect of primary palmar hyperhidrosis, which may be genetic, and causes its sufferers great anxiety. I don't want him to hold my hand, the way he likes, while employing his neurosis as efficiently and seductively as he can. But if I don't enter the main hall, I'm not deterred from my walk. Still, I'm often drawn there, as if a voice called me to it, and, like dousing a fire, when I tell myself I shouldn't and instead to think about the consequences, I do enter the spacious, dark wood room, whose corners are sometimes decorated with one or two residents gazing at photographs of lakes, deer, and birds, or the director and staff taking a break; but I'm eager for excitement or surprise, and there may await something unexpected, though usually here, and elsewhere, what is unexpected isn't. I know the Count is sleeping and Contesa rarely shows her face before dinner, needing all the solitude she can get after breakfast; Spike, with the ready laugh, is in her cabin, talking on her cell phone or studying and writing formulae; the inventor, whose restless innovations may be the result of prostalgia, is joining lengths of copper tubing together; the demanding man is sulking, though he might even be in the main hall, waiting for attention, and yesterday I attempted to avoid it but walked in, anyway, which I can't explain, even to myself, except that I'd scheduled a therapeutic massage later and had only time to kill, since that's all there is.

  When I'm in the place I call home, where I have a young wild cat and an old, frail mother who may or may not miss me, I see a Japanese therapeutic masseuse, whose attitude toward the body is vastly different from the Polish cosmetician's, who twice has massaged me with gentle strength and kneaded my body respectfully, though she may not respect it or me. The Japanese masseuse acts against my body, she forces it to comply, as if trouncing a truculent enemy, and I can see her wringing her hands and canvassing my legs before moving toward them, to exact revenge. She prods my lower back with her sharp knees, jabs my taut shoulders with tight, rabbit punches, and thrusts hammer thumbs into tense, blood-deprived muscles. When she punishes my body sufficiently, after throttling it mercilessly, it might come around, resign itself, or relax. With her I am not a sensitive character, my body is physical matter
, a noncompliant even unwilling agent, in which I, her client, am trapped or by which I am possessed. She hopes to free me with a method that produces majestic pain during a session, when I yell and grunt, but after a session, I experience some release. It's true that I have a body about which I had no choice, but with which I can choose to wrestle by volunteering for a painful massage, though I don't believe in absolute evil or the devil as a Frenchman here does and who claims he accepts and even courts its presence within him.

  There are guest scholars, philosophers, scientists, spiritualists and mental health and community activists, who, on some days, both before and after dinner, speak on their subjects, since it is said to be a tonic which cleanses the mind, or that it helps the mind to encounter new ideas, or to fill ourselves with others than we have, and sometimes there are surprises. A resident can't avoid attending at least some talks, because the administration looks askance and concludes that you are not trying hard enough in your endeavor, whatever it is, and that you may not, through no fault of theirs and only yours, make progress. I skipped "Against Renaissance Perspective," "Spin Control Is Out of Control," "Live Food, Raw Food," "My Life in Accounting," "Beyond Repair or Damaged Forever," and "The Lures of Fly Fishing." On occasion the lecture committee brings in theater groups, whose plays and presentations are supposed to be thoughtprovoking but not so provocative as to disturb a resident's peace of mind. I heard a talk by a local member of the Audubon Society: "What is a voice to a bird?" as well as a carnival historian on "The Life of Frieda Pushnik, Armless and Legless Wonder," a forensic anthropologist on "The Natural Fear of Death," and a local minister on "Banish Misfortune." Occasionally residents present, and the Count gratified me and some of the residents, including the tall balding man, Contesa, J and JJ, and their squarejawed midwestern sidekick, on an evening after dinner, which was his late morning. It lasted precisely ten minutes, the span of time he had decided was reasonable and appropriate, not to waste a minute of our lives, or his, every second was precious, and placed his gold pocketwatch on the table, noting its movement periodically.