American Genius: A Comedy Read online

  Other people's stories can mollify and soothe, like a few capfuls of bath oil in a hot tub are supposed to do, and how-to and grammar books, along with biographies of philosophers and criminals, generally bring relief and a sense of safety-safety is a reasonable amount of risk-since a philosopher's life includes contemplation and a criminal's is at least not my own. These books facilitate sleep or delay sleeplessness, with its onslaught of nameless hurts, when I listen to steam belch through the pipes and other noises that don't occur during the day. When I'm in the other room assigned to me that is not for sleeping but has a cot on which I never rest, because for rest I can return to the bedroom, which I'd rather do, I can look at the photographs of friends on a wall. I tacked them on a white wall, careful not to pierce their images, including ones of me and my mother, who can't live too much longer, because no one lives forever, and several of my dead father, and friends, dead and alive, and also scenes I relish or postcards that have recently been sent to me. My collection is growing. Often I think about my dead friends and wonder why people who complain about the unfairness of life want to live forever anyway, since most do want to live forever. Many people complain about how hard life is, but no one wants to die, or very few people want to die. My uncle died before his time, my father never recovered from his brother's death, or his son's furious flight, some of my friends died before their time, and I may not recover, because there are some things you don't recover from. The past can't be recovered or changed.

  Billy never told me his real name, I never knew it, just the one he gave himself, and I didn't push him, I thought there was time, and his reticence or shyness about his given name, which named his past, was a curiosity but didn't bother me, since I thought one day he'd tell nie. Melvin was his given name, a stranger beat and murdered him, and was never caught, which is not unusual. A stranger to whom my existence is nothing, and who would not listen to me, could end my life, and I wonder if, when the two young women are my age and start to piss frequently, they will remember me and the sound of the toilet flushing in the middle of the night, which must wake them. But one told me it doesn't, that she can sleep through anything, even my machinations, I thought, and I might remember her for that, something I don't exactly believe, or I might remember both of them because they slept in rooms near mine, crept into and out of their bedrooms, one had short hair cropped to her head, the other long, curly hair she brushed from her face like flies, and they didn't make much noise or play their radio late at night, the way I did during this certain, momentous period of my life, when I was sequestered with strangers in a place not unlike the one where I was sent to summer camp when I was too young to know that I wouldn't always be there. The two take fewer baths than I do, they prefer showers, I also like showers, but want the slowness of a bath, and though I never stay in a bath long, the idea of slowness draws me to it, and the wonder of near-total immersion, which I'm advised relaxes the body, as well as the mind, along with the salubrious oils liberally poured into it that also could help my mood and moisturize my skin, restoring the precise oils that a good, hot bath depletes. But I must take care, my heart is a problem, there is often a pressure or a weight on it, a tightness that has no discernible organic cause, my internist tells me, still I'm careful about immersing myself in extremely hot water and let cold water run, to reduce the temperature. Maybe their skin is less dry than mine, not only because they are younger but also because they take showers. Still, bathing is salubrious, a luxurious waste of water, though it is plentiful here, so I don't have to worry about it now.

  I won't always he here, and if I consider that, and regularly remind myself that I only have to be in a particular situation for an hour or two, whether I'm unhappy or not, I can manage it. An hour is a short unit of time, unless you are being tortured or are in some other terrible situation, like starving in a refugee camp. I can imagine myself in almost any situation for an hour, except awaiting execution, being slowly suffocated, being chased and hunted down like a fox, or being tortured, and if I am able or allowed to leave or even escape a situation, since almost anything can be managed for an hour, I'm reassured. I've been cold and miserable; I've been lost; deceived; I've been bored silly; drunk; my underpants have been wet from nervous agitation; the skin on my inner thighs has chafed to a fiery red from rubbing against wool; I've been robbed; fainted from shock; and I've been alarmed beyond words or stricken with fear hearing hitter words flare between friends in freakish eruptions of hatred in bizarre locations, since most sites are not right for confrontation, and when I have no right to speak and no involvement, except self-protection, I have become itchy, my skin a plane of heat, as if a match had been struck against it and my entire body set ablaze. But I was able to withstand it, only because I knew it would end. I have, since cast from home like the carrier of a deadly virus, been the object of virulent words and some violent acts. It is when you're a child and dependent and have no sense of time and don't know that things will end-your parents will die, you don't have to stay in school, the kids you hate won't always live near youthat it is sometimes impossible not to cling to old things and places, because what might come and who could be there and take their place could be worse.

  The two young women often looked disconsolate, the way they did this morning, and as usual I didn't want to become involved in and acquainted with their deepest fears, familial or romantic problems, and so I avoided them, walking directly into the kitchen to order two eggs over medium from a woman who has worked in the kitchen most of her life and whom time, in whatever dimension it dwells, has not treated well. Her thin skin was wrinkled, having lost its elasticity, and she had probably never had a facial, certainly not with any regularity nor does she apply rich moisturizers to her desert-like skin. I couldn't help but notice also how everyone who ordered breakfast spoke to her beseechingly, their voices pitched higher, the women almost squeaking in deference, the men suddenly sopranos, all awaiting a sign that she was aware of their presence and, more, that she liked them and would feed them munificently, but the head cook, who has been here many years, was often moody, tired, or overwhelmed by her outside life, about which none of us was privy, and avoided their eyes and gestural entreaties for easy affection, sympathy, or love. I wrote down my order and, instead of begging for notice, kept my head low and eyes fixed on a notepad upon which I scrawled 2 Fried Eggs Over Medium in block letters, but with gusto, after finishing, said: Thank you. The cook reminded me of the Polish woman, because she served people, as the Polish woman served nee, for a price, one I could pay, though the cook couldn't or wouldn't have a facial, never having cared much about her skin, never wanting to spend the money, or never having been told she was sensitive and so was her skin. The Polish woman might be insensitive, I've sometimes considered.

  After I sat down to wait for my eggs, while the dining room clamored with more near-latecomers, I avoided the eyes of the others at our table, which was near the toaster and convenient, but the man in his T-shirt who always began conversations that annoyed me assaulted us with his longing. He said he couldn't eat his eggs and poked their yolks with disgust, which bothered Violet, a mysterious woman, whose light brown skin suggested biraciality, or a mulatto, as she preferred to call herself, who averted her eyes to ignore his agitations, but whose lips twitched, as she refrained from eating her meal. Violet, I soon named her Contesa, paused when she brought the yellow eggs to her mouth and her mottled gray eyes, which could have been laughing, metamorphosed into titanium, but he went on, the demanding man. He hadn't slept because his dreamwhich he annotated with his arms whirling like a miniature windmill, while he also alluded to Don Quixote, simultaneously, to underscore his relationship to his mother and mother country-had disturbed him, and none of this mattered to nee, yet I listened. He rubbed his beard and forehead repeatedly, so his oily skin shone even when weak sunlight hit it. I had learned, in another breakfast discourse, that he'd had impetigo as a child, which left no trace, except the type that is invisible and most imm
utable, but maybe his early surroundings were unclean, his mother inattentive when he was an infant, perhaps he lay in his own urine for hours, dependent on others for the care he never received and now seeks in strangers. Yet he tells us his mother doted on him, that she did everything for him, that he was spoiled, which he proclaims proudly, as Violet, or Contesa, smiles, nearly laughing, I think, but this is conjecture. Impetigo is not unusual. It is a staph infection that occurs most often in childhood, when its prognosis is best, since it's worse in adulthood and usually occurs in hot humid climates or during the summer. His mother may have adored him, as he insists daily, and still he caught a staph infection. Impetigo occurs most frequently on the exposed parts of the body, the face, hands, neck, and extremities. There's impetigo of the scalp, too. The lesions rupture and a thin, straw-colored seropurulent discharge appears. That exudate dries to form loosely stratified crusts that accumulate layer upon layer until they are thick and friable. The crusts can be easily removed, though, and what's left is a smooth, red, moist surface that soon collects new discharge or exudate, and this spreads to other parts of the body, through fingers, and by towels, or household utensils. But, in the history of the disease, it is an extremely superficial inflammation. The demanding man had been born in a hot climate, though he no longer lives there, but instead resides in a cold, midwestern city, about which, though he's well dressed and fed, boasting a burgher's belly, and claims to lead the good life, he voices voluminous complaints: its climate, especially, bothers him, raw cold shoots through him like a spear, as he puts it, and also he is so far from his mother. His dependence is interminable, his complaints unassuageable, and I have known many such people.

  My mother doesn't refer to herself as sensitive. She has beautiful skin that is still unlined and smooth, to which, during the majority of her life, she applied nothing but cold cream, though regularly, and to which medicinal creams must now be applied daily, because her skin has become more dry and sensitive with age, but she can no longer apply it herself. Her hands, once capable, tremble and sometimes shake. The cold cream jar was milk glass, large, with a wide mouth and black metal top, and sat on a shelf in my parents' bathroom, smelling of sweet dreams that might fragrantly coat not only skin but the whole body of existence. I often watched my mother apply the cream and rub it rapidly and efficiently onto her face and neck, which she appeared to do without any significant pleasure, as if in the act of replenishing her skin she was also denying it, but I can't remember if, afterward, she washed her hands, rubbed the cream onto them thoroughly, or wiped the cream off her hands onto a soft cloth or towel. Her only sister, and the oldest in her family, there were four brothers younger than her, had skin as slippery as butter, like my father's cottons and silks, smoother and softer even than my mother's supple skin. Her sister used ordinary Jergen's Lotion, my mother explained, that was her secret. Still, if I apply cream now, when I didn't for years and years, in the vise of a perverse vanity, it's because of the Polish woman and her concerned, attentive expression when she tenderly pats and caresses my face. It is this picture of her and the thought of her future admonishments, when she clucks her tongue slightly, a sound I dislike and associate with eating habits I also dislike, that arouses me and makes me uncomfortable enough to close my hook, get off the bed, walk to the dark wood dresser, a piece of furniture I would never have bought, but which is appropriate for this old-fashioned room, open a large jar of moisturizer and rub the expensive cream upward on my cheeks, careful not to rub it under my eyes where the skin is more delicate and might become damaged by vigorous motion. I've never understood why. Still, I'm cautious, having been warned of the possible damage many times before, and when I became aware that skin could be damaged by use, as I did at the age of ten and a friend's mother strenuously warned us not to laugh too much or too freely, because lines would form around our mouths, I heard her words with worry, since I loved my friend's mother better than my own. She was pretty and young, unlike my mother who had waited years to marry, whose prospects with my father had always bordered on failure, but who finally claimed victory or success with a man she would then find undemonstrative. My friend was her mother's first child, horn when she was just twenty-one, while I came late, when my mother was forty, and the second child, or baby, and certainly the last she brought into the world.

  I rub any excess cream onto my hands and then onto a towel, chiding myself that I shouldn't use the towel, but instead wash the cream off my hands, but that would mean trespassing through the halls, treading on old floorboards to the bathroom and running the water through the old pipes that make noise, even at the faucets, merely turning them, no matter how studied my effort, and waking the two women near me on the floor. Across the floor, at the opposite end, there are two more people, a man and a woman, who sleep separately, but who also may not, and whom I never see in the house, and I don't believe I wake them. I carefully wipe off most of the cream onto a towel, which I'm not required to launder, since I'm not responsible for washing my sheets and towels while I'm here, but I also rub off the cream carefully, because I don't want to ruin the pages of the hooks I'm reading and because I dislike the feeling of grease on my face and body. The cream might prevent my skin from breathing, and I could feel suffocated, but I try to do what I'm told is good for me, though often it is contradictory.

  I don't want to think about the two young women or the Polish woman, whom I hardly know, but who has made as strong an impression upon me as people I know better and see more. The Polish woman plays a part in my life, unimportant to anyone but me, one of many unacknowledged relationships of which I never speak, since the relationship between the person who gives you a facial and yourself is assumed to be insignificant and would not become an account I would offer people, even close friends, who have busy lives. Everyone has a busy life, and generally I don't want to make others listen to me. People don't usually want to listen, and often only wait for their opportunity to speak, generally about themselves, and most don't know how to listen, especially about matters that to them are insignificant and about which they will silently protest, Why did he or she mention something of no interest to me. To me, the importance of the Polish woman is clear. No one else applies cream to my face or tells me how sensitive my skin is, no one else regularly admonishes me and appears to worry about my skin, and, when I am with the polish woman, I experience feelings that are remarkably different from feelings I have with anyone else. I feel entirely relaxed and comforted, and have thoughts I don't often have elsewhere, like thinking that she, a Polish woman, is there to serve me, though she is unhappy, and her unhappiness has to be masked in order to serve me properly. She tends to my skin and me, a woman of Jewish origin, a faith in which I have no faith and feel no spiritual kinship, but into which I was born, and tells me how sensitive my skin is, when not many years ago Polish people, possibly her parents or grandparents, might have made skin like mine into lampshades, and it is the only time I ever have that particular, almost wry thought, which occurs fleetingly in the cramped, dingy salon.