American Genius: A Comedy Read online

  -I'd love it, thanks.

  -My son's turned eighteen, lives with my ex-wife in Des Moines, usually. He's the one who found me on the floor, unconscious. I had a seizure.

  -That's terrible, but he found you in time. You're lucky.

  -I'm alive.

  Brusquely, in the manner, it seems, he performs everything, he uncorks the bottle, smells the cork, rolls it in his stubby fingers, pours a splash into his wine glass, swirls the glass, inhales the wine, and drinks, first rolling the wine on his tongue and in his mouth.

  -Excellent. Needs to breathe. I think the food here is great compared with other camps I've been-everything but lunch. So, I was in the hospital for three weeks, and they discovered noncancerous polyps.

  -You've had your share, she says, drinking greedily. I have asthma.

  -I've had three colonoscopies, two angiograms.

  -Bodies. I hate bodies, mine especially.

  -But I'm good now, I have a clean bill of health. So, what do you think? Like the wine? It's vintage.

  -It's great. To health.

  She toasts and smiles, shows her red pulpy gums, I'd never seen this solemn twenty-eight-year-old smile broadly, her teeth are uneven and milky gray, as if she hadn't had enough calcium as a child, and, when she smiles, closes her eyes, like an ecstatic or someone who can be happy only when the world is absent. Her lower teeth are especially set back, recessed, which caused her weak chin, I suppose, she couldn't have had braces, orthodontics, as a child, what did her parents think, did they have no money, or didn't believe in straightening teeth, did they think it was just cosmetic, but the face grows with the body, sometimes ahead of it, my nose was suddenly long when I was short, then I shot up, my face filled out, while I lost my puppy fat. Orthodontics might have saved her from this unfortunate structural fault that makes her appear sadder than she may be, because now she hardly smiles, and when she does, displays sickening gums, and I feel an uncomfortable wave of nausea.

  My mother often becomes dizzy, but not nauseated, she can barely stand without some dizziness, and when my mother had a seizure, after the first operation on her brain, she sat up in her hospital bed, her head pushed forward, her back bent forward, also, and sewed an invisible cloth, her fingers stitched neatly and never quit moving, in precisely the same way, again and again, seemingly inexhaustible, and she was unseeing, unaware of herself and me, the doctors, she said nothing for hours. Now, when she stands up too quickly, the room whirls pitilessly, her legs weaken under her, she holds her forehead dispiritedly and moans, so I tell her to breathe slowly in and out, count, one, two, three, four, and she does, imitating me like a child, but I have no idea if this actually helps her. In the days before my father died, when his heart failed and he lay in a coma for a day, brain-dead, he recognized trouble, and, ever vigilant about his body and medical condition, in a weak hand he had noted, with few crossings out, his symptoms: 1) I have no appetite, nauseous, 2) some stomach pain (little), 3) sleepy, and, at the top, he wrote: I do not w ... He halted then. My father had many fears, of playing the stock market, of heights, of his mother, of incapacitation, of death, as I do, though I believe death is nothing, but then nothing can be frightening when it swallows your days and you don't know where time has gone, which may be why he didn't finish writing the sentence: "I do not w ..." I'll never know. On the other side of the note, just a slip of paper, he wrote "wheeze-phlegm-sleeping" and recorded his meds, amiodaroni, lasix, coumadin, lanoxin. My father recognized he was dying, in his last night of consciousness, and he must have been disappointed with himself, afraid and failing again. He admired Winston Churchill, inordinately, for his bravery, and Churchill's final words were, "No more." Before my father fell into a coma from which he never returned, he smiled at his doctor, he was happy to see him, his doctor told me later, maybe he thought he'd beat death, but when my father died, he said nothing.

  I notice the Count speaking to one of the new residents, the professional magician and obituary writer, and now he is steering him over. I shift in my chair and arrange the pillow under me, but comfort is not forthcoming, as they are wooden chairs with hard, wooden slats at the hacks and woven cane seats that squeak, designed, built, and carved by JD, and I don't dare complain about them, ever. The Turkish poet has arrived, Henry and Arthur, who enter with him, Spike, and Contesa, too, and suddenly the table is complete. The anorectic disconsolate woman and the tall balding man seat themselves far from her friend and the stout Wineman, when actors j and JJ, and their sidekick, the guilt-ridden, silent lyricist and the demanding man slide into chairs near them. All the others are settling in at various tables, the young married man next to the new resident, Rita, or the saint of lost causes, and beside them the dour man and fretful woman, whose addition surprises me since they generally keep to themselves. My second heart grinds with nameless worry, and ungracious doubt rumbles in my intestines, so I fear gas. JD chooses his seat, his boots muddy, his overalls sticky, he smells of pungent raw honey, I sense when he's around, and he sits next to some nondescript characters, who will stay for a week or maybe two, whose first names I don't know, and who often don't come to breakfast but eat instant oatmeal or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in their rooms.

  The head cook has created an order and routine to her dinner menus, which, after many, many years, she has honed into a three-week pattern, so that a resident or guest who has been here for a while, as I have, and the Count and Contesa, will have several times eaten her array of dishes and know her preparations, the ingredients of, and dressings for, salads, the sauces for meat, usually leg of lamb or pork chops, fowl, chicken, roast or fried, and roast turkey or turkey loaf, and fish, mostly cod with capers and broiled or poached salmon, the side dishes, rice and beans, broiled mushrooms, always available for vegetarians and vegans, creamed broccoli, fresh, steamed asparagus with a lemon sauce, potatoes gratin, boiled red potatoes served with chives, wild rice, and her range of desserts, chocolate or vanilla ice cream, bread pudding, tapioca and chocolate pudding, cherry, peach, and apple pies, and chocolate, banana, and vanilla cream cakes, there is always a serving of fruit, so dinner is rarely a surprise, except for the night she presented us with bowtie pasta swimming in melted caraway cheese, which caused us all consternation except the young married man, who, though regularly grumpy, likes every meal. The wretched dish reeked of the head cook's despair. Sunday night, when both the head and assistant cooks have the day off, and a substitute cook arrives, it is vegetable risotto and pizza, and all diets are attended to with meatless, cheeseless pizzas, vegetable pizzas with and without cheese, pizza with cheese and pepperoni, pizza with cheese and tomato, pizza with no cheese and no tomatoes, and so on, they are labeled, and there is a generous bowl of green salad, without tomatoes and peppers, but with several dressings, on the side, a term much used here. Sometimes a resident's first name is written on a card that is set on a table, and then you must take that chair, the chairs are serviceable, poorly designed and lacking in any quality, such as charm, and the card's placement indicates you have specific dietary requirements, which have to be accommodated by a special meal, and then you feel singled out, not necessarily in a good way, but a few like any attention, though it's not auspicious to demonstrate certain types of need. It augurs well that the Magician is beside me now, since as soon as I heard him tell Saint Rita that he performs magic for a living, a striking conceit, I hoped to learn about his ancient, perplexing profession.

  Dinner is three courses, the most elaborate of the day's meals, often poor, and its longest, but at breakfast everyone can find something to eat, unless they are late, though there is usually bread, milk, and cold cereal available, which is not the case at dinner. At dinner, there is an appetizer, tonight it's crudites, then there's the entree or main course, and a dessert. There are warm, packaged rolls, which one resident steals and hides in his backpack for the next day, as he is already anxious about the next day's meager lunch. Another regularly pilfers fruit and raw vegetables and is known t
o arrange carrots in rows on the top of his worktable, where he does computations, to watch them dry and curl up. Salad is served with the main course, and the few Europeans among us have it after, while the Americans have it with the entree, and then there is dessert, and, with it, coffee, decaffeinated or espresso, tea, black, herbal, or black without caffeine, cream, whole milk, skim, and soy milk, and everyone can find something to eat, special diets are accommodated, in moderation, though most residents are dissatisfied, because lunch is invariably poor and at dinner most are hungry, except the anorexics, who are starving but will not eat and who hide their disease until they are almost dead, and thirty percent of them die of this kind of contemporary wasting.

  Looking at Contesa, whose dark glasses are perched on the bridge of her small, sharp nose, obliterating her gray eyes, I imagine that her play will be inhabited by her spirit, which I must count on, as I do, one day sliding into and negating the next, though irregularly in the Count's upside-down schedule, so her mind will be present onstage, which could inspire me. Nervous doubt unclasps my stomach and it quiets, and, with that, commences an appetite. The demanding man is also gazing in Contesa's direction, his large brown eyes morose as a moaning cow's, but she ignores him once again and nibbles a stalk of celery. The night the inventor exposed his rosy ass was exciting, since it was beautiful and the event out of the ordinary, this morning the psoriatic woman and the tall balding man revealed their intimacy, there was nothing indecent about it, but it held some content and provoked memory, and in the moment, again the demanding man seeks Contesa's aid for what her interest enlivens in him, and I await or have hope for an entertaining evening fomented by the Magician's novelty and Contesa's liveliness or spirit.

  -Poached salmon again, laments the Count.

  -But it's her most flavorful dish, says the Turkish poet, with good cheer.

  -I can't bear it, Contesa says, mournfully.

  -But salmon's good for brains and sex, urges the Turkish poet.

  Almost in unison, Henry and Arthur intone, "it could be worse," which is an uncommon observation here, but they're relatively new residents and often ironic. The Magician watches us like rabbits. He shoves the cooked tomatoes on his plate to the side, and they fall off next to Spike's dinner plate. The Magician is allergic to tomatoes, which is sad, because tomatoes that have grown during a hot summer, without too much rain, so they don't get mealy, are magical, ripened under a brilliant sun, as they were in my mother's garden, then sliced and served on a plate, succulent beefsteaks warm from the rich soil and hot sun, but now my mother doesn't remember her tomato garden and doesn't like to eat tomatoes because of their skin which she can't chew or digest. "An old hell," she said once, cavalierly. The Magician is also allergic to bee stings, bees produce their sting by the ovipositor of the female abdomen, and when stung, a poison-apitoxin-containing formic acid and a neurotoxin is introduced into the skin. I was stung by bees twice. Once I was practicing the piano in camp, when I thought a stabbing pain in my stiff Fingers was caused by a lack of daily, rigorous practice and that my piano teacher was punishing me for my dereliction, but it was a bee. The ovipositor of the honeybee breaks off and remains in the skin after stinging. The bumblebee is able to retract its stinger, but the reaction to stings may vary from a mild, local edema and pain, to severe anaphylactic shock and even death, which occurs more frequently in the case of multiple stings unless prompt therapy is undertaken. The imbedded ovipositor containing the poison sac should be scraped away with a sharp knife, but I don't believe that was done when I was in camp. I took an antihistamine the second time I was stung, yet the area around the sting swelled and throbbed painfully, but unless the Magician carries a kit containing a syringe, epinephrine and antihistamines, when stung, he could go into shock and die.

  My dermatologist has treated many cases of infected bee and wasp stings and encountered serious cases of maggots, when, for instance, the Wohlfahrtia vigil gravid fly lays its eggs on the skin, then the hatched larvae migrate to the folds of skin into which they burrow. An inflammatory reaction, first as a papule, then as a lesion, is produced, and maggots may be seen in this lesion, where it seems to pulsate. The female of the human botfly, or D. hominis, glues its eggs to the body of a mosquito, stablefly, or tick, and when the unwitting insect punctures the skin by its bite, the larvae emerge from the egg and enter the skin through the wound. He has seen innumerable cases of crabs, or pediculosis pubis, contracted chiefly by adults as the result of sexual intercourse, not infrequently from bedding, railway berths, and toilet seats, as well as human flea bites. Fleas exist universally among people and animals, and the three most common in America are the human flea, Pulex irritans, the cat flea, Ctenocephalides felis, and the dog flea, Ctenocephalides canis. Fleas are small, brown, wingless insects about one-sixteenth of an inch long, and are very flat from side to side, with long hind legs. They jump actively when disturbed and are known to be extraordinary jumpers, helping them travel from host to host. They extract their food from the superficial capillaries, causing hemorrhagic puncta surrounded by an erythematous and urticarial patch, characterized by intensely itchy welts. The irritation is produced by the injection into the skin of a fluid secreted by the salivary glands of the parasite, and some people have an apparent hypersensitivity to this secretion. Fleas carry disease, endemic typhus, and plague, which is transmitted to people by the rat flea, Xenopsylla cheopsis and other species. Parasitical fleas sucked the lifeblood from my cat's kittens in Amsterdam, where most summers they infest the city and suck their food from humans and animals, and about their fatal effect on young cats especially I had no knowledge and no warning, so all the tiny kittens except one died, for which I am to blame.

  Table talk segues to mercury in fish, solid white meat tuna versus flaky tuna, both in cans, the fate of the poor salmon, to America's polluted rivers and streams, during which the Count adds that fish and other creatures are consuming medicines and vitamins humans beings pass through their urine into toilets that flush into streams and rivers where fish feed.

  -Imagine what hormones do to fish, says Contesa, tapping the flesh of her salmon.

  -Some have already become androgynous, says the Count.

  -Everything mutates or dies, says the Magician.

  -I'd love to learn magic tricks, I say to him.

  -I can't tell you how, I can't show you tricks. Magicians can talk to other magicians about their tricks. That's it. We're a closed shop.

  -Are you allowed to discuss your interest in magic?

  -I belong to the International Brotherhood of Magicians, and there are rules. We have secrets, it's our trade. But let's say it sprang from my interest in mathematics and numbers. I'm what's called a close-up magician.

  -What's that? Spike asks.

  -I work small groups at tables or standing up in front of small audiences. I do card tricks, coins, hand/eye magic, and patter is very important.

  -Patter? Henry asks.

  -Everyone has patter, says Spike, intimately.

  -I've got a routine, I talk my talk. Patter's very important, it's part of the art of misdirection. I can't say more, but I can say there's lots of rehearsal, a lot of work goes into my act. But I really can't say more.

  The Count and Contesa pay close attention, and she even removes her dark glasses. The table is staring at the Magician, who accepts this matter-of-factly, but then he's used to small audiences and even absorbs our interest with magnanimity, while Contesa leans toward him from across the round table, her palms up, as if to show him her past and future, and her canny eyes resemble crystal balls.

  -Do you contact spirits? she asks.

  -I don't do seances. I've done a few, but I don't like to. I can. They're too emotional, I can't sleep afterward. I don't do stage illusions. I don't do escapism. I'm not an escape artist.

  -Houdini was, she counters.

  -Houdini did it for the money, the Magician carefully explains, he was a close-up magician, but he couldn't support his family
. That's why I have a day job. There's big money in staged illusions. But I wouldn't do one of those for a million dollars a trick.

  -I collect antique timepieces, the Count interjects.

  -The spirit world isn't just illusion, Contesa goes on. Houdini and his wife made a pact, they developed some code or other. She did a seance to contact him.

  -Actually, she tried to contact him ten times, the Magician says. Houdini was a skeptic, but skeptics need convincing. They're insecure.

  -Sex is real, big magic, says the Turkish poet. You think it's so, Helen?

  I blushed.

  Like the Magician, I wouldn't be buried alive, chained and bound in a coffin, and dropped into the ocean for money or any other reason, but its appeal probably is sexual, since there's the lust to be smothered under mounds of flesh, all senses buried, the brain pressed to do its commanding submerged below layers of skin and fat. Right now I could insert a forgotten word "amaxophobia," the morbid fear of riding in a car or carriage, which is cited in the library's sex manual, but Spike jumps in, relishing his challenge, and, for the delectation of our table, though possibly not to the Magician's taste, she reveals an episode at a sex club, where she discovered her wholesome, strapping massage therapist in the middle of a large, noisy room being whipped, her nipples in steel clips, her ample flesh quivering in pain-filled excitement. Spike hoped that she hadn't been seen watching her, but she may have been, nothing was said, and now during massages, Spike's fantasies are flatter but less humiliating.

  -This is no sex to me, the Turkish poet says, almost stricken. It hurts my heart to hear.

  -Like bad poetry, says Arthur.

  The Turkish poet claps his hands.

  -Yes, yes, bad poetry hurts the heart.

  -And bad sex, says Spike.

  -They're episodes of stupidity, stupidity has no sense or sensation, says Contesa. Sex can be dumb.