American Genius: A Comedy Page 17

  I carry the language book to the postcard tray, where I shuffle through the frayed stack, and it too hasn't changed, the written messages are as repetitive and empty as they were some days ago. Yet I hope for surprise, more and more, though it's the twin of disappointment, and I want to disown its wanton seductions, but wherever I go, I wait for it, even when I don't know I am, but then I am trying to become more aware, with help, the arrival of which might also be a surprise. I had the surprise of a second mysterious postcard a while ago, when I needed it, like a good laugh. Its typed message was even more simple and blunt: Can't give up now. The signature again appeared to have been scratched onto the card, like a bird's sharp claw might make. On its front the word GREETINGS was covered in glitter, extolling the name of a town that could have been in IA or IN, but it wasn't clear, since the card was torn at the bottom, obscuring the state's identity, and the post office had enclosed the card in a plastic bag, on which they issued a formal printed apology for the poor handling and consequent damage their sorting machines had caused. Some people can't apologize, ever, those who should apologize rarely do, because in their minds they're always victims, like a woman I barely know, who was in residence briefly, a dour character who snubbed me for no reason I could ascertain, we barely made contact, but when I came near her, she showed her back to me in the main lounge, which disturbed my peace of mind. I have done this to others but with a valid reason, as when mutually recognized enemies appeared, their presence an assault, and I couldn't bear their contemptible faces, yet they understood my behavior, since they felt similarly, my presence disrupted their peace, too, but the dour woman's behavior also and paradoxically contented me like an ambiguous tale. She may believe I owe her an apology, which I might give if I understood her complaint, but her complaints are likely endless, for her longings go unfulfilled, she had many ambitions, to be in the foreign service as a diplomat, I heard her say to another, but her father and mother blocked her, and her older sister, too, and daily she grows more bilious, further from her goals. It's easy to perceive her injuries and disappointment when she throws her head to the side and peers with big, dull eyes at a group of people near her and displays, like an angry dog, her contempt. She quickly left the community, to seek another where she might not be as forlorn and receive better counsel, though it is unlikely. The post office regularly apologizes for its many mistakes, and as before when I received the first postcard, on the message side an illegible but familiar signature stood, and again, with the arrival of the second postcard, I recognized that a mysterious character had thought of me, benevolently, maybe a former lover or an amusing acquaintance, though that might not be so, since I do have enemies, like the two former, devious friends I avoided, as well as ones I'm not aware of, even the woman who suddenly snubbed me and disappeared may be an enemy, but I quickly determined not to prolong consideration of the message's meaning or its putative sender, pleasing myself with my sensible forbearance. It must have been six weeks ago that I hid the second elliptical and tantalizing card with the first in a drawer that smelled of pine and blanketed both under a one hundred percent cotton handkerchief, so that I wouldn't see them even accidentally, though I know they are there, the way I know that heavy, frequent snowfalls in the northern hemisphere offer temporary beauty by disguising, for one thing, the ugliness of slovenly and unimaginative architecture.

  The shopkeeper wears an old-fashioned costume, because it is Founder's Day week, the town is two hundred seventy years old, and my interest in American history often brings me into proximity with characters such as the shopkeeper, who revere the past or want to simulate it in ways I don't. On this spot, she attests, and we both look down at the unswept floorboards, the town's founders decided there must be a library, and it is one of the towns in America that first had free, public schools and a free, public library, and in her shop, many yellow-paged books describe the town's illustrious past, along with outdated manuals and instruction leaflets, whose pages fall out when opened, on knitting and the other homely arts, as well as on languages, which contain a type of history, at least one of endeavor and of trial and error. The Polish woman might vacation in a picturesque town like this, with her mother or girlfriends, visit the abandoned mills, historic inns, or churches where Jonathan Edwards damned congregations, or go skiing, ski comes from the Scandinavian languages, also, and she might spend a long, active weekend exerting herself until a film of sweat dampened her skin, since, never liking to be idle, when the devil does his work, she's told me, she enjoys walking, volleyball, and most forms of exercise, especially going on outings and strenuous hikes. I don't go on outings or never call them that, though my trips to town might indeed be outings.

  The owner of the store has hung photographs of her dog on the wall behind her, a large, black and brown mutt, a mixed breed, like most people, indistinguishable from many others, but I know, because of the way I feel about my animals, that for her there is no other dog like it. My slightly wild cat is black and unmarked, and, he would, if he were lost, be hard to trace, because, unless you loved him, as I do, you wouldn't notice his endearing characteristics, which make him unusual and appealing, since he is not just a black cat, though he is that, too, and only that to others who don't love him. The Polish woman has never mentioned cats or dogs, she might not like animals, or she might like them but not want them to ruin her furniture, a reservation I don't appreciate, because it betrays a respect or reverence for the material world or a materialism I don't admire, though I love chairs and textiles, and would not want either ruined by my cat, but people in this town revere their pets, people everywhere love their animals, and, on the picture-perfect streets here, hulking, aged Labradors creep after adoring masters, and in the town's two cafes and one diner, small dogs sleep on human laps, since dogs are allowed in the bookstore, antique store, drugstore, and health food store, and no one complains about allergies to dog or cat hair, though some people must be allergic to dander and own special vacuum cleaners to facilitate its elimination, in order not to have to expel their beloved animals. My dog was given away by my parents, who pretended to love her but must not have, or if they did, it's a mystery how they could have abandoned the beloved, innocent animal to a shelter and had it killed. Both the family cat and dog disappeared, taken by night or day, left somewhere or given away. The cat supposedly ran from the shelter, jumped out of its cage, and I have many times conjured the scene in the animal shelter, when the cage opened, and someone was about to feed her, and she, wily and desperate, took her opportunity and raced out, far away, kept running until she reached a highway, followed it, and tried to find her way back to the people who supposedly loved her, but then she was hit by a car and maybe killed, or she spent months on the road, wounded, and winter came and killed her, though she had been exceptionally sturdy and resourceful. When my family bought our comfortable house, which was built to my parents' and the architect's specifications, my mother decided that our cat, who was then very young, but very different from my cat now, should live near the house while it was under construction, and that we should visit her every week since we came anyway to see the house's progress. There were woods all around at that time, the area was forested and swampy, not a yawning suburb, which it would eventually become, and back then the cat was left there in the woods, to scavenge and hunt, and every weekend we visited the house and her. My mother, to whom the cat was devoted, because she delivered the cat's first litter, which included a breech birth, whistled sharply, two fingers tucked in the corners of her mouth, and from a distance we could all hear the excited scramble of a four-legged creature racing happily, even madly, through the leaves to her and us. The cat always came.

  The shopkeeper's dress is wool cambray, coarse and brown, a simple design with no excess, no flounces or decoration, a studiously severe outfit like that which might have been worn by a Puritan prison guard, and she also wears a stiff bonnet tied under her chin with a gray grosgrain ribbon, whose serrated edges sink into her fleshy neck,
reddening her olive skin at those points. In this town and the environs, the textile industry flourished from the beginning of the 19th century, when the region was home to many mills, as well as ball-bearing factories, and none of this is now evident except as historical lore on plaques. The town and state has many rivers and streams, great water power for running mills, and Eli Whitney may have passed through; his cotton gin is mentioned in the town's brochures, though it wasn't invented here. Rows of warping machines dwarfed child workers, whose fingers and hands must have bled from cuts, their soft skin hardened and scarred over time from the process of carting, spinning and sorting the rough raw materials, cotton and wool, into threads, yarns, and finally fabrics, while the multitude of spindles revolving in spinning rooms whirred and cranked noisily during the ten- to twelve-hour workdays. In 1860, not far from here, in Lowell, Massachusetts, there were more cotton spindles than in all the eleven states that combined would eventually make up the Confederacy, so the North had an industrial advantage, though both white Northerners and Southerners mostly disdained skins darker than theirs. In America the Industrial Revolution proceeded with strength only after the Civil War ended, and the first textile factory workers were like indentured servants. Max Weber theorized it was slavery that brought about the end of the Roman Empire, as Rome's troops were complemented by their slaves who needed to be fed and housed when they advanced, so they weren't productive labor, they didn't fight, but instead slowed the Roman army and cost it dearly, and slavery might have similarly ruined the American economy as it industrialized, since slavery was part of an agrarian society. In the postcard tray I search for something I might send the Polish woman, who wouldn't expect attention or remembrance from me, since she never thinks of me, and I sometimes believe she doesn't know my name, but because of that I'd like to mail her a pleasant card, since I do think of her. Choosing it prolongs my stay in the shop, and while I ramble about, the kitchen helper has probably left the cafe, as the shopkeeper tugs at her uncomfortable dress, looking at me with suppressed impatience, and at last I settle on a postcard with a pastoral scene that might be appropriate to the taste of the Polish aesthetician. The shopkeeper smiles now, relieved, and soon she'll ask me to return, which I will, but on a long-ago visit to a similar shop in the South near a similar town, where fate was summoned when I rejected a man's advances, I'd accompanied a widow whose husband had been a renowned scientist, who herself had written essays on science, popularizing the subject for the lay reader, as she put it, and after he died, she often spent time away from what had been their home, but then relief was not the outcome of our visit to this shop. The widow was ordinarily restrained, yet in the store marveled broadly and audibly about an object concocted by one of the town's craftspeople, of wood and paper, which, when she picked it up to see it better, crumbled in her hands and fell to the floor, ruined. The shopkeeper demanded she pay for it, and my friend, the widow, refused, at first calmly, since she had not misused it, she declared, or hurt it in any way, but then neither character relented, and when the irate shopkeeper reached for the telephone to call the police, the circumspect widow, who was then my friend, and I walked quickly to her car at whose door she wept from humiliation, collapsing in my arms, because standing up for herself had drained her of life. I never went back there, to the store or the town, though I think of it, because the woman was shattered by the experience, which reiterated earlier ones, and, shortly after our disastrous outing to the store, she returned to the place where she was lonely without her husband, who, she also confessed in her car, had drunk to insensibility most of his life, was cruel and violent, and where she once was the subject of an investigation, based on circumstantial evidence, when coincidentally she fled from her husband's drunkenness on the same night a robbery occurred in the town where she lived with him, relative newcomers, and she happened to be noticed in the middle of the night, wandering upset and aimlessly in the small town, and became a suspect, though she was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time, but circumstantial evidence stained her present with an enduring blot.

  I pay for the English language book, along with a boy's story, Adrift in New York, by Horatio Alger, which begins auspiciously, "Uncle, you are not looking well tonight," as well as the pastoral postcard that I hope to mail but could also tack on my wall, and the shopkeeper nods her head under the stiff hat and mutters that her costume smells of mothballs, and, in a sweeping, balletic gesture, shucks off the stiff hat, revealing her flattened hair, which makes her seem childlike, hairless like a newborn, though some are born with full heads. I don't ever wear a hat, though I might if I'd been ordered, lost a bet, or was paid a million dollars. I look silly in them. My vanity is exhausting, it sits uselessly in me, since the body lies, certainly the eye does. Ruskin wrote, "All literature, art, and science are vain, and worse, if they do not enable you to be glad." Veins and vanity lie deep beneath our skins but can be more visible and on the surface in some of us. The pale blue veins on the backs of Contesa's creamy beige hands delineate her script, since she believes much of life is told in and by the body, with which, in a sense, I concur, but her mysticism isn't mine. She believes mostly in what can't he known or seen, which also can't be entirely dismissed, and in the numina which establish their spiritual, ghostly, or ethereal presence wherever she is, and this reality is confirmed and evinced by the fact that, when she found her Kafka, who died of tuberculosis, she contracted pneumonia, and her lungs inflamed in a physical emulation of her intimate tie to him. Now she has the beginnings of emphysema.

  I haven't told her about the tarot card reader. His oracular statements echo and vibrate internally, just for me, and their truths or falsehoods are also mine, that is, I know I am also, I live as, in some sense, my arbitrary selection of his predictions. The tarot card reader's blemishes weren't distracting, they were not even notable, it was mostly his hands and lopsided mouth I watched when he announced, portentously, Ah, let's see what happens. He contemplated the three rows of cards and explained that there was the past, present, and future. The high cards were in the middle, the past on top, and there were the qualifiers, the details, he said, which he explained but which I didn't catch even as he spoke. A woman sat in the middle, he said, that's you, but he didn't look at me then, for which I was glad. He told me that fives were not bad, since they were in the middle range, and I had two fives on either side of the present or the past, but I remember he said: Coins dot the table, you have more of those than anything else; and logically, I thought, he started at the past, where, he said, lifting up a card, there was the last judgment. Look, the angel is blowing his horn into the skies and the dead are rising out of their coffins.

  Even now this harrowing image sits inside many others, but maybe it won't come to pass too soon.

  It was the recent past that the cards showed, which was behind what lay before us, like a settling of accounts after which you could clear the table. I liked this idea of clearing the table of the past. I also like tables, but not as much as chairs. This suggests, he continued-he looked me in the eye-some epoch has closed. I thought of many things, including the man who no longer lived with me whose presence was a comfort and a bother, or comfort itself was a bother, as I fear complacency, and so I threw out the baby with the bathwater, when I should have, I'd heard, kept the bathwater. The reader now said, You may he starting something new-it is not a break, a rupture, but in the sense we use the word now, a closure or resolution, and so the thing has been completed and makes some ground from which to proceed. These characters are resurrecting into a new life in heaven. They're not just finished. But this period is done for you.

  His sensible hands appeared to have done manual labor, each finger had calluses, though only his index and third fingers on his left hand were stained from nicotine. They fluttered and danced over the cards to draw more prophesy. His lopsided mouth was probably his best feature, and I waited to hear my fate from it. He said, alarming me, that the exception proves the rule-these two in the present
-coins, worry, and this heart, disappointment, and my handmaidens-heartbreak and worry in the world-they're fives, in the middle-two fives-well balanced-they're probably true for you anyway most of the time-the heart card equals a crush-it could be your work or a person-but it's mastered in the outcome-the queen is a master, so she can handle it, and improve the situation immeasurably-you might not have the problem again-it could be financial disappointment-but you lose something, and get to keep the rest-they follow exactly-you do hard work and some goes to waste-premature excitement of the heart and there's a letdown-just like real life-this is a monkey holding a mirror up to this girl who's doing her toilette-it's a very old image-it may have to do with the mockery of vanity, an opposition to vanity.