American Genius: A Comedy Read online

  At dinner one night, the youngest resident, Lois, an enthusiast, who'd had several drinks, though some of us never do, she always did, her face never flushing, explained the Brazilian wax method, in which the hair at the crack of the buttocks is removed, and she'd heard about a woman in Brazil who, while she underwent this procedure, as the hair was ripped from the split between her buttocks, lay on her stomach and moaned loudly, became wet, her skin hot, then returned for the treatment frequently, experiencing arousal and climaxing each time, until the beautician refused to service her. The youngest resident who talked about the Brazilian wax method, whose reason for being here is a secret, an American born of Latin American parents, was bright with a ready laugh, and often related stories I listened to with pleasure, especially her sexual adventures, of which she had an explosive store, since, except for the tall balding man, who, I learned, was an electronic composer, who scores for computer, and, for money, worked as a programmer, and the woman with psoriasis, no one seemed to be having sex with anyone else but themselves. Nobody but the youngest female resident, Lois, I called her Spike, whose hair was long and brilliantly red, mentioned masturbation. It was, like a fart, something much adored by the person doing it in private, who was embarrassed to admit liking it, since, as a sex manual and dictionary from 1958 defines it, masturbation is "sex-abuse, the manipulation of the sexual organs until sexual satisfaction is experienced. At one time considered the cause of innumerable diseases, such as: consumption, idiocy, insanity, cancer, locomotor ataxia. Now regarded merely as a bad practice, because it is apt to become habitual, in which case it can become very injurious, whereas occasional indulgence is not. Many of the evil effects are due not to the indulgence in masturbation itself, but to the fear that it will have evil results. Also called Autoeroticism and Ipsation. In European literature this practice is wrongly referred to as Onanism," whose correct meaning, according to the manual, "is coitus interruptus and nothing else." About this difference the manual is adamant. 1958 is not long ago, it is recent history. Contesa, gentle-faced, but attentive as a cat hunting prey, its tail quivering, said once, after a swallow of red wine, "For some it's masturbate and wait, masturbate and wait." Most at the table laughed or smiled, especially j and JJ, former actors, women who have lived together for years, and like to rehearse past scenes, I'm told, naked, and also their informal male sidekick, a square-jawed Midwesterner, whose quiet, downbeat style doesn't dampen the rumor that he did something very awful once, unspeakable even, which necessitates his guilt-ridden silence. He is a lyricist, whatever else he is or was, and rarely bothers me, though his sycophancy can be cloying, but I once heard him say, "I don't feel secure right now, I'm just going to keep my eyes open, mind my Ps and Qs," so his dependency made sense and again he never bothers me. But the demanding man flinched with annoyance, his skin darkened and reddened, and all who paid attention recognized him as what a quaint Englishman once called a secret masturbator.

  Residents can borrow books such as the sleep and sex manuals from the library, which has four rooms on as many floors, each furnished with dark wood furniture, several benches that are functional and unattractive as well as institutional, uncomfortable chairs, because the decor is meant to encourage seriousness, studiousness, or contemplation, though in one room there is a piano and two lutes; in the others, reference books like the sex manual, outdated, in the future to be replaced by newer ones whose information and definitions, which are just explanations and interpretations, will also turn outdated, and these ponderously line the shelves of the four rooms. I'm drawn to manuals and reference books, which sate my ravenous curiosity and often lead me away from what I should be doing, the way some others are, so with these residents I may trade citations at dinner, and I prefer to read these books like stories whose repetitive tellings shape the world. To he distracted from worry and hurt, or entertained, when I'm alone and the peace and blight of night eliminates what I like as well as what I don't like seeing during the day, I read in bed, keeping the pages of books free of stains, especially the old, borrowed ones, but some marks come anyway with time, like foxing, small brown stains, and wormholes, which are caused by worms, actual bookworms, that subsist on paper. Some damage appears almost miraculously, though I don't believe in miracles. I have known people who do, spiritual people, people who believe in God, along with their own and other peoples' goodness, and who depress me, like the Polish woman who gives me facials. She is religious and goes to church on Sundays with her girlfriends, or mother, possessing guilty secrets, sinful thoughts, about the glowering man who waited impatiently for her when I was there, hearing his restless movements just outside the dingy room in which I was being tended carefully, though I don't know what was on her mind as she steamed my pores. She will never tell me what is on her mind, and I don't want to know, since I don't want to listen to her when I am being attended to and cared for like a baby, just as I wouldn't tell her what I was thinking, observing an unwritten code that allows us to be at ease with each other in a regular, but intimate situation in her cramped place of work.

  Each time I visit it, I wonder if her life will have changed significantly, and if she will ever be happy, because she never seems happy, though she has a lovely smile. She usually appears to be sullen, or even sad, or just reticent or expressionless, though she might simply be stupid and dull, the way I think one of the two young women is, dull, mostly, though days ago, I watched her lusterless eyes quicken, sparkle, when the tall balding man spoke to her, yet I didn't guess at their involvement then, just her desire, which had arced from her like a rainbow. He had arrived some weeks ago, the tall balding man, virile, though his posture was poor, and his comments were usually cryptic, I discovered and liked, and he stooped over still more to talk with her. My father stressed posture, and this man sagged, his head hung, he was slackjaw, and yet the young woman responded gaily, ignorant of how the world bore down on him, though demonstrably it burdened his lanky frame, since he couldn't keep himself upright. It is hard for me to look at people with terrible posture, since my father, who held to a high standard for Homo Erectus, impressed its importance on me and held his frame up, defying his depressions, and I can't much contemplate or converse long with a person whose shoulders slouch severely, whose skeleton is skewed, or whose head juts far forward, since misshapen and rounded shoulders look full of pain, which is unspoken, and could indicate rough, early treatment, insufficient care, or inadequate childhood exercise. Bad posture can also indicate an inner disturbance so fundamental it forms the basis of the skeleton, the curved and twisted bones declaring a person's initial and formative inability to meet the world, instead withdrawing from it, bending under the burden, and some retreat into their carapace, one they might want later to shed. The skin registers the inner world on the exterior, as the world external to it marks it as well. There is also the deleterious effect of badly designed chairs on a young, growing body.

  I want to take apart an Eames chair, especially this morning, I believe I dreamed of it, I have taken apart other chairs, though none as beloved or significant, for about these chairs there is no disagreement, and I have split apart boxes, mattresses, TVs, and a corroded car that sat in a field, but I don't have an Eames chair here, just its memory as well as photographs of it and its designers, the Eameses, husband and wife. It's satisfying not to make things, to undo them, the way experiences can't be, since undoing is an activity like doing, or I think it is, and thinking is an activity like riding a horse without a horse, and it's especially pleasing to engage with and analyze the undone object, since after destroying something inert I can see its construction, even its larger design in my life. When I took apart a square box, I thought of the satisfaction I had learning geometry, the simplicity that resided in planes and angles, as well as of the geometric character of a family of four, how from each corner a mother, father, daughter, son must relate, each in and with a corner, and that any balance was necessarily of two and two, which was why my parents must have wanted a
nother child, for balance, but they delayed too long, so when I arrived I unbalanced my brother's corner, he had lived in a triangle, which has its own balance, and then he fell from his pinnacle or place, never to forgive me or them. Taking apart a TV, I thought about impulses and connections, its delicately colored wires like nerve endings, and when the guts of the TV were scattered on my floor, life itself seemed disconnected. Invention is a human necessity, and lasting value has nothing to do with it, since everything is temporary. For a while now, I have found it hard to make things, when once I wanted to fabricate what I hadn't seen before-before trying that, though, I had to overcome a phobia to three-dimensional objects-and once I did, I could easily build them, but then I also overcame my need to build what wasn't there and wanted only to unbuild what was. Now I rarely want to do even this, except in thinking, where I test spatial relations and imagine space bounded and unbounded, and happily move non-things about in unreal places.

  When I was first here, no chair gave me what I wanted, and I tried many, though ostensibly I just wanted a chair that could support my frame, so that I could forget about it, as I ruminated, awash in thoughts I wished I weren't having, or in some that I wanted to have, roaming into places where a chair and its design had no function, since I also wanted a chair to do more than it was designed for. The chair designer Harry Bertoia said, "The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living. The assumption is that somewhere, hidden, is a better way of doing things," and that's sensible, or in my life it is, because I'm looking for a chair that fits me and in which I can feel at home, since homeyness is easier to locate in things than in people, or even in animals, but I like cats, dogs, and chairs almost equally, though I have more control over chairs, which are inanimate, but any cat or dog is in some way pleasing, while most chairs aren't.

  When he was first here, the tall balding man gave his attention to the Count as well as to the disconsolate or sad-eyed young woman, divining in her some pleasing quality or grace no one else did, except the other disconsolate woman. Early on I observed an acute scene between them, the man of no consequence to me or the woman, when he held her skinny, psoriatic hand to his face, brushed her palm against his sunken cheek, and then uttered some words I couldn't hear, but their thin-lipped exchange held some fascination. Thin lips are scant protection, a mere lining to the crater in the face, that worthy hole, but my lips are full, suggesting a lushness I don't believe I deliver, just as big breasts incriminate the female body with lusty abundance and comfort. My mother told me to be happy if nay breasts were small-and I'm rather flat on the chest, full in the face, tall for a woman, lean everywhere, something like an aging boy-because when I was old, like these women, my breasts wouldn't drop to my waist. I was four when I gazed rapt at a cluster of old women, their pendulous breasts touching their waists, while my mother and I sat on a bench in a Turkish bath near the ocean I loved in a beach club I also loved for a time.

  It would be a miracle if, in two or three months, the Polish woman changed demonstrably, because people don't often change, and, if they do, it's in small ways, unless they've undergone a trauma, watched an accident when they were old enough to remember but not comprehend; no one will ever entirely comprehend specific events or irrational acts that forever remain outside human comprehension, though human beings committed them, or witnessed their father murder their mother or their sister or brother die, unable to help, in a fall, or saw a house burn infernally to the ground, hearing terrible screams inside. My father told me that men never change, that women should never expect to change men, though they do, and that my mother was angry because she could never change him, or that is what I surmised, because he didn't say that was why my mother was angry; he said, Never expect to change a man, don't be the omnipotent female, your mother always tried to change me, but she couldn't. I wouldn't think that was entirely true, anyway, that was why she was angry, I don't know all the reasons why my mother was angry: her older sister was prettier; she was a middle child, forgotten; her father was in the Austrian army and he kept his treasures in a small box and she never saw them; she didn't ever have a birthday party as a child; and her husband, my father, was a vain, lively, sometimes cold man, whom everyone liked better than her. But she is not angry now. My mother is old, her brain is damaged from a condition whose cause is unknown for which she has had seven operations, or procedures, and though she is remarkably strong, resilient, capable of falling and not breaking a bone, her mind and body slowly deteriorate. She takes a variety of medicines, to which she has never been opposed, though like many people her age and younger, she is distrustful of pills, but unlike many, she favors doctors, especially if they are men with whom she can flirt. She should've been a medical doctor, it might have brought her the contentment that my father couldn't; she diagnoses herself and others freely and well, noticing symptoms early and astutely, calling them by their medical names, never flummoxed by the onset of a physical problem and ever practical about it, interested clinically, and calm, when about most other things she is not.

  The disconsolate young woman, often listless and withdrawn, fearful of exposure, hiding more than her anorexia, a flamboyant symptom, is careful and circumspect, but she and the tall balding man have been flirting ever since he arrived. The staff discourages such behavior but it is not forbidden, while the staff may not become romantically engaged or fornicate with residents, though it's happened once or twice I'm told. The tall man, a formidable systems analyst, is a striking if severe figure, and his baldness is only male pattern baldness, often he wears a baseball cap to cover it; but on some days he takes it off and displays his scalp. It is not Alopecia areata, which, in the male, shows itself in the late twenties or early thirties, and is characterized by a rapid, complete loss of hair, first in patches, usually on the scalp, the bearded area, then the eyebrows and eyelashes, and, rarely, the other hairy areas of the body. With some, there is a total loss of scalp hair, which is called Alopecia totalis. When it's lost over the whole body, it's Alopecia universalis. It was first described twenty centuries ago by Celsus, but its cause is still unknown, though emotional stress is most frequently mentioned. But even impacted wisdom teeth might have an effect. My dermatologist explained that it could have been incurred first by trichotillomania, a psychiatric disorder which shows itself mostly in children, when the parent might notice sizable, persistently bald patches on the scalp, or in the female adolescent, when she plucks her hair, strand by strand, and that could incite Alopecia, but generally it's not the case. The appearance of the neurosis, trichotillomania and also trichokypto- mania, in which hairs are broken off instead of torn out, has increased since the advent of TV, he said, about which interpretation I wanted to ask more, but he's a busy man. There is usually a characteristic motherdaughter relationship disturbance, with various borderline psychoses, and many sufferers require psychiatric help. But the tall man's is only male pattern baldness, and few residents have noticed the two, except Contesa and myself, though neither of us expected a serious involvement, which was, in a sense, manifested this morning, but we'd observed that the two watched each other for signs of interest and flirted harmlessly, which is often how brief libidinal investments are characterized. The young woman may believe she can change, even transform, him, so that his poor shoulders straighten and that she might rest her head on them, or that she will lift his spirits in other ways, compel him to shed his carapace and grow a new one. I see them mostly at a distance, though sometimes I have moved nearer, to hear what they say. He fences, a parry and thrust dialogist, while she picks words slowly, as she does food, pushing most aside, hoping to hit upon the best one, to please her sense of truth or her companion's sensibility.

  -The worst thing is it's not over yet-we're not safe, the disconsolate woman says haltingly.

  -Safety's everyone's Maginot Line, the tall balding man teases.

  -What's the marginal line? she asks.

  The disconsolate woman tenses, reddens.

  -Mag-
i-not. Maginot Line. In World War I, the French expected the German army couldn't attack across its border. Couldn't penetrate it, but they did. Voila.

  -There's no safety then, she says.

  -Here?

  Here, strangers are thrust together, intimately, eating two meals together, whose intake betrays them, and, as I eavesdrop on their conversations at breakfast, still drowsy and inside a dream, like one about Saint Bartholomew, of whom I knew nothing, preaching inside a Gothic church, until I looked up his name, which turned out to be my father's in Hebrew, I am wary that my day might get off to a bad start and proceed badly, so I try to be careful about what I swallow and absorb. Living with unfamiliar persons who will never be more than relative strangers, whom I awaken at night by going to the bathroom and flushing the toilet, since I usually get up twice in the night, I can have fitful dreams. I have dreamed of tiny mice, who, though adorable, are nuisances and must be destroyed, I have watched them die slowly and in agony on glue traps, which I chose rather than traps that beheaded them, because I thought it more humane, but when I watched the mouse squirm with pain, I realized it wasn't, or, if Contesa has again spoken of Kafka and Felice and showed me their pictures not long before I go to bed, I dream about them, who are strangers to me, as is Contesa, relatively. She believes she knows Kafka, especially through his letters to Felice, though she can't know Felice that way, her letters to Kafka aren't extant, but still it is by her faith in their intellectual and spiritual connection that they invade my unconscious world. Felice's pleasant, homely face was oily and dry in patches, even scaly, and around her nostrils an irritated aureole of pimples the size of pinpricks. She broke out in welts, red hives on her hack and thighs, just as she was about to meet Kafka, who looked like the tall balding man, but was wearing a frayed black business suit. Felice, like the disconsolate woman, but much stouter, stood at the door to the cafe discreetly, rubbing her thigh. Suddenly she was terribly skinny, suddenly, and her digestion was poor, so there was a terrible smell coming from her mouth, like the breath of the demanding man, she wasn't a vegetarian like Kafka, and horrified she ran away and fell down. She tore the skin on her leg, and the ragged wound bled furiously, so in my dream I became dizzy and nauseated. Her skin inadequately protected her, it now flaked like snow on her cheeks, as dry as mine. But skin is the agent of the body that protects its other organs, by covering them, and by being an information station that allows the other organs, my doctor explained patiently, to adjust to changes in the outer environment. My condition, dermatographia or dermatographism, skin writing, is not life-threatening, but because of it my skin tingles, pulses, and itches, and if I were to stroke my arm with a fingernail, white lines would surface and be visible for at least fifteen minutes, as my skin releases histamines, which produce swelling, and this occurs in about ten percent of the population, but the swelling is not a hive, since in dermatographia only raised lines surface, which resemble writing on the skin. My dermatologist says friends could leave messages on my hack, but they'd fade quickly. The skin is a harrier against dehydration; it can lower body temperature by the increased evaporation of sweat; it synthesizes keratin, a flexible, durable, and resistant protein. Keratin is available in some shampoos, but it is likely not helpful, since my dermatologist has often remarked that expensive skin products do little or nothing, that people, women especially but also men, are fooled regularly, though now there is surgery to correct the aging body that produces quick, sometimes disastrous results. If even the skin fails, then much worse can be expected to follow. The skin reveals and encloses, too, its failings are revelatory, failure is more revelatory than success. Contesa believes that Kafka despaired and reveled in writing's failures, its fundamental inadequacy to the experience of life, that he was stern with himself but failure for him was expected, since it was true and exigent. In my dream of a severe Berlin winter, even the skin around Felice's fingernails cracked and bled. I believe Contesa is writing something, but she doesn't talk about it, and here silence and circumspection are honored, when in the outside world, they usually aren't, since people want to find out what may help or harm them.